This post is the 4,100th post on this website.  Because the useless tools provided by WordPress  do not allow the creator of the website, Phillip Whidden, to distinguish a post that is just one sonnet from a post that has more than one sonnet in it, readers need to be informed that this post contains two sonnets, not just one–although the post is counted as if it is only one sonnet.

“Marcus Aurelius”; and “Unveiling and Cocoons” —

Paired Sonnets

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     Marcus Aurelius

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

The limbs which bend towards earth with fruit, with pears

And apples, are the poems waiting for

Your words.  The eyebrows on the fishing bears

Are villanelles already weighting more

Upon a poet’s schemes.  A mad dog’s foam

Requiring rifle bullets for the pain

The beast is suffering is the poet’s loam

To raise a sonnet in.  In life a stain

Needs poet midwife to deliver love

It rose from, though from beauty it is far

Removed.  True ugliness is not above

A poet’s husbandry.  He reaches far.

  The poet gladdens or perhaps must tell

    Of Purgatory, Limbo, Heaven — Hell.

Unveiling and Cocoons

He fails to see himself as writing lines

Imposed upon the life around, beside

Or even in his veins.  Each thing defines

Itself.  A poem is a sea with tide

And wave.  Each thing is waiting thinly for

The means to be expressed.  In science that

Is done with formulas but metaphor

Is what he uses.  Life is full of fat

Suggestions for his pen.  He, only, needs

To let the bulged bud bloom, become a leaf

Or blossom, or a butterfly.  Life’s beads

Become a poem necklace, rhyming, brief.

  His work is like the April rain’s cool hex.

    He writes and sees young petal colors flex.