Modern Sonnets
The Facebook Sonnet by Sherman Alexie
Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let’s undervalue and unmend
The present. Why can’t we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let’s exhume, resume, and extend
Childhood. Let’s play all the games
That occupy the young. Let fame
And shame intertwine. Let one’s search
For God become public domain.
Let church.com become our church
Let’s sign up, sign in, and confess
Here at the altar of loneliness.
Sonnet 30 by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
“next to of course god america I” by ee cummings
"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beautiful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
Sonnet, Without Stuntmen by Sherman Alexie
1. Okay, if you've ever felt immortal, please raise your hand.
2. As Indian boys, we turned the reservation into a test of
our immortality. 3. For instance, we climbed to the treetops,
stood on the thinnest branches that threatened to snap under
our weight, and leapt from one pine to another. 4. Nobody
ever fell. 5. Not quite true. One kid fell, slashing against
bark and cone for fifteen or twenty feet, before he grabbed a
branch and saved himself. 6. The Indian Health Service
doctor removed over one hundred slivers from that kid's
skin. 7. For some reason, the tribe had dumped a pile of huge
and unused sewer pipes down a sand hill behind the school.
And we Indian boys turned it into a playground. 8. Once, I
crawled to the top of a pipe, propped high into the air by
other pipes, and hung off the edge by my fingertips. I was
twenty feet off the ground. 9. Nothing is immortal, but some
things live for a long-ass time. There's a fungal colony in
Oregon that's been alive for 2,400 years. 10. Yeah, those
fungi were toddlers when Jesus Christ was rambling around
with his twelve buddies. 11. Here's a curse: "I don't want to
live forever; I just want to live longer than you." 12. I knew
an Indian who leapt from a thirty-foot cliff and dove toward
a shallow pool only three feet in diameter. 13. I wasn't there
when he crashed into the rocks and died. Why didn't any of
the other Indians try to stop him? Because they thought he'd
survive. 14. I'm not afraid of death; I'm afraid of Indians
who aren't afraid of death.
Sonnet: Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,
by Karen Volkman
Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,
the earth, blue egg, in its seeping shell
dispensing damage like a hollow hell
inchling weeping for a minor sea
ticking its tidelets, x and y and z.
The blue beneficence we call and spell
and call blue heaven, the whiteblue well
of constant water, deepening a thee,
a thou and who, touching every what—
and in the or, a shudder in the cut—
and that you are, blue mirror, only stare
bluest blankness, whether in the where,
sheen that bleeds blue beauty we are taught
drowns and booms and vowels. I will not