The Sunday Sonnets

I once heard that, as Christians, if we are to give something up for Lent, we should also pick something up for Easter. As someone who has only barely ever even done one Lent fast, I probably wasn't the best candidate for such a task. This Easter I didn't do that, precisely. Instead I decided to pick something up for the whole year after Easter: one Easter to the next. While during Lent I fasted during the weak and feasted on Sunday, so for this Easter celebration I have celebrated only on Sundays.

As an amateur poet (in the truest sense, as I do it for love) I've always loved composing poetry, but a good deal of my initial poetry was throughly pierced with teen angst and disappointed love. Most of that is nothing I would call good. The older I get, I find myself taking a sort of romantic turn and more and more I am about some Truth hidden in Nature. The Sunday Sonnets intentionally have a religious tinge. As such, this is no doubt the only place they will ever be published.

While I have neglected my blog for sometime now (during Lent I gave up non-academic computer use, and I never seemed to pick this site in particular back up afterwards) I thought it time to revive it at the very least for this sonnet series. I'll divulge all I have since Easter now, and then update every Monday or so until it is impossible for me to do so.

Sunday Sonnet I

Here’s my first unrighteous sonnet,
Official sonnet of self-righteousness,
Where virtue’s greater had my pen not drawn it
But swollen hands could argue little less.
For worked upon a heap of self are ash,
Or else, are termites to infest and rot.
And westward Easters elongate the gash
Which mutilated love songs first begot.
Let me arch back towards the highway where
Depths of oceans trip on their own crests.
Let humble, selfish lines betray my care
Of wading through the shorelines where I rest.

Where ten beats scrape to pardon seven days
And fourteen lines pay in’fite virtue praise.


Sunday Sonnet II

When Mary grappled with Your open tomb
Heaven itself did not delay Your voice.
And You bid peace while dishing out the doom
Of these, Your fish, who falter in their choice.
Yet I seek not Your grave, I search Your feet
For fear of my reflection in Your eyes.
I’d like to travel footworn trails, and meet
You coming home to newly foreign skies.
But while I’d get a blessing for my doubt
And justice for my restless persistence
My bread seems rather firm to me, without.
And I still crumble in a wayward glance.

Lord, be not silent, and be ever near
For prayers, unlike a scar, won’t disappear.


Sunday Sonnet III

Perhaps it is appropriate that I
Should blunder now. I won’t deny – forget.
For fish do not mend memory, but a lie,
And mem’ry falters more than I’d admit.
For we who vomit, laugh and cry and sweat
May seem quite large in our patheticness
And as we etch our epics in regret
We think divinely love must be but less.
But there’s a rumor of a splinter cross
And I have heard a dwarfing of the stars,
A sort of moral gain and mortal loss
And watery grace against these prison bars.

When floods make mountains kneel, a voice will say
A sonnet may be writ on any day.


Sunday Sonnet IV

Did the forest speak to thee, when thou walked
The earth? And the winds disrupts thy hair
Some years ago, when even oceans talked?
Or was it thou who bid’st the shaking air?
And did’st thou bless the first light bulb? Was
It thy intent? Dos’t thou speak through the internet?
I cannot rest until I ask because
This tool can’t be quite what thou meant.
See, we who grasp and get and guess grow dull
Of stringing lives like beads upon a plug.
And microchips don’t grow like trees, and pull
Our heartstring roots, yet there is still a tug.

I cannot fathom answers to binary tests
And I can fathom Truth but little less.


Sunday Sonnet V

In the end, that most bold beginning
When twelve men welcome, and twelve more uphold,
Is there refuge, at last for the sinning?
Or is such adamant mercy too bold?
Are our bodies spread out like a city
When Jerusalem is finally your bride?
Is condemnation a form of pity
For those who’d bar the walls of cities wide?
Though it’s within your ability
To wipe the tears from tears. To save all you
Desire to free – all, quite objectively.
He said: “Behold I’m making all things new.”

Confirm your will for yet the least of these
And then, they who will not surrender – seize.


Sunday Sonnet VI

Two roads did not diverge, no, they converged
Where it became clear they were never separate.
And all that duality’s fin’lly purged
When we enter a physical gate.
And the connections we make are like nerves
In the skin of a self we are only
A part of. Let’s give each the value deserved.
For a fingertip is never lonely.
So may my feet still know the ground when I
Return. And may the trees always bear more.
May my inklings never even scrape the sky
Which curtains always covered up before.

And so we’ll meet when forks become a knife
And I will enter in my one, but only life.


Sunday Sonnet VII

Here’s to something physical, the human
In the heart of God. Here’s to the bone and
Flesh. For clouds may lead where ever they can.
Sometimes we need, instead, a helping hand.
Here’s to the Spirit that remains, as we
Would seek to understand. Here’s to a Guide.
For though our eyes may wither we shall see
Him leading strangely, entering inside.
Here’s to a gentle breeze and ruffling leaf
Who’s coded in a million willow cells.
Who cannot yet forsake, despite His grief,
A nation full of frightened rebels.

And here’s to something else, I cannot quite
Perceive, who beckons louder every night.


Sunday Sonnet VIII

He said, “it’s better that I now should go,”
To leave 12 friends and countless broken bones.
With so much warning, flew away. And so
Bacteria penetrates deeper stones.
Like raindrops falling on a startled skin
We might hear battle ravaging the skies.
‘Tis better,’ He knew, ‘to enter within,’
To bind our hearts to Him like tired eyes.
For He shed blood to quench our therapy
To block the moon from a heart race of waves
And calm poor Suna’s ever-bitter sea.
What kind of Truth, by sacrificing, saves?

‘Tis better,’ He though, knowing winters fruit.
For his’try runs like veins in an Oaks root.


Sunday Sonnet IX

I’ve grasped my courage here to reconcile,
To spout my faceless ramblings to the dark,
To you, whose voice grows softer all the while
To tempt electrons with a sudden spark.
I’ve heard the sacrament when they confess
Is that repentance finally is true.
But I’m no Cath’lic, so is mine the less,
With promises to heal that never do?
If I could have one gift in all of space
It’d be for this to be the gift that I
Would ask. That maybe change could come apace.
And I would never make deny.

For sorry as I am, as I repent,
There’s still a piece to see her penny spent.


Sunday Sonnet X

And so twelve years have come to this, have come
To tired eyes and promises of love.
An maybe now my journey has begun,
Or maybe I but barely rise above
The she I was five years ago. Any yet,
I’ve overgrown those fences I once climbed,
Of history to reconcile regret.
And I’ve re-sought what I can’t hope to find.
Yet here’s my new diploma, and here’s my
Mortarboard – a little more than dress-down
Clothes. They are the secret passcode, and I
Am little apt to resist such a crown.

And perhaps now my real life, at last, will start:
Adulthood like a hatching of the heart.


Sunday Sonnet XI

Grant me a spirit like an Irish folk song,
That I may be cheerful in my distress,
Ad a happy sorrow for ages long
May, at last, redeem that spirit once depressed.
And if my heart must beat beyond my chest
May it drum to the rhythm of their pipes
With something like a reckless hobbit, blest.
Growing clover where were sown the stripes.
May I turn highways into dusty roads
That hide beneath a canopy of green
And find the rain refreshes, not erodes.
And see, at last, in mud, a somethin’ clean.

And grant me only half the joys they claim
And a jig that boasts both pride and shame.


Sunday Sonnet XII

When we’re finally rid of our legions
And worthy just enough to beg to go
Sacrifice our lives for new allegiance
With purity barely budding through the glow,
Then restless hearts may find a peaceful calling
Like clear skies slowing down the pace of days.
And though our instincts onward charging,
There is a mission some less “sexy” way.
So would I follow even to the suburbs,
Where ease is yet a harder burden borne?
Like Abraham, it may be testing, absurd,
But relativity breeds varied storms.

So even if my trek abroad’s begun,
Enforce that not my will, but Yours be done.


Sunday Sonnet XIII

Wash over all our Bloody Sundays with
The blood and water You so freely gave.
And if our aims or temperance should then shift
We beg, remind us what we might have saved.
A war-torn city and some painted walls
May serve as a “P.S. Remember me.”
So new youth grow t’inherit parents’ cause
As child Joseph learned of slavery.
And May, at least, we learn from our mistakes
When we can’t learn from them who went before.
Let’s not nail abstract “freedom” to our stakes,
At least allow our broken “Nevermore!”

And may our Sunday’s be called days of rest
When we can’t find the heart to call them blessed.