from Letters to A Young Poet

NOTE

I realize features of a sonnet are like taking a photo with a fixed, prime lens. Things like enjambment and the fixed verse structure. Enjambment reminds me of attempting to get a feature into frame, when you cannot zoom.

Through my life there trembles unlamenting suffering dark and deep, without a sigh. Pure as snow the blossoming of my dreams consecrates the stillest of my days.

often though a question’s gravity cuts across my path. I seem to shrink, pass coldly on as if besides a lake whose waters are too vast for me to measure.

And then a sadness settles, dim, opaque, like the grey of pallid summer nights, shimmered through with stars - now and then -:

love is what my hands attempt to grasp because I want to say a prayer with whose sounds my burning mouth, my lips, cannot bring forth…