a certain indefinite number of Petrarchan “sonnets” (80)

Ordinarily I don’t publish so much poetry at Theoria-press, and instead try to provide mostly essays with an odd poem or sonnet occasionally interspersed among them. But the Muse’s visits have outstripped my ability to keep pace with prose pieces so readers who prefer essays should peruse the archives of this site, which are replete with them. Also, I should acknowledge that the formal aspect of this “Petrarchan sonnet” is liberally conceived so it’s unnecessary to alert me that at “Petrarchan sonnet” with 17 lines is like a quartet with 5 members, though criticism and rebuke is always welcome from anyone who feels so moved.

---

WITH one beat of its great wings time scours
clean and sweeps away as with a broom
all of Summer’s handiwork to the gloom,
a shroud of silence weaved of faceless hours;
empty are the fields and bridal bowers
but for the presence of a sullen brume
that broods upon the absence of its groom
accompanied by unremembered powers—
now it falls on you to tend these flowers
that God has within your heart set to bloom
with songs of providence, when all was lost
to you, devoured by the thankless past
but so what if that just is love’s cost
and you must wager all unto the last?
for everything shall in the end be tossed
into time’s flames: but then you’ll too be cast
and there reunion consummate at last

Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash