a certain indefinite number of Petrarchan sonnets: №120

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. This is more-or-less an actual Petrarchan sonnet so it will not be preceded by my usual exculpatory disclaimer about having departed from the paradigmatic form.

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A LANTERN lit and under bushel placed
a lyre plucked but dampened in its strings
a bell that’s struck and muted when it rings
an echo in my ear, an aftertaste
upon my tongue that vanishes in haste
and to my heart no light or sweetness brings—
they’re bound in the opacity of things
yet they can never fully be encased:
through stained-glass windows of her form it shines
that light of Heaven and the star within
her soul made manifest in myriad signs
through laurel eyes of hers, and white-rose skin
and as the goddess lives in divers shrines
to her each thing of beauty is akin

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