Bubbling in the answers,

You realize you got one wrong

And you flip over the pencil

To correct your mistake

But your eraser can’t quite

Make the mark go away

So you try harder, desperate

To remove the error

But you leave a smudge or

Worse, you tear the paper.

You may know most of the answers—

You may know them all—

But this one stays wrong because you could not

Erase cleanly.

 

As the test continues,

You look for the patterns,

Ways in which one bubble

Leads to and predicts another;

But just when you think

You know what comes next,

The pattern

Breaks down, and you overthink the question

With the most obvious answer

And, undecided, you leave it blank

To fill it in later

 

But you never do.

 

Or, sometimes you get to the end and discover

That the bubbles don’t come out even

And you have wasted all the time you had

Putting the right answers in the wrong places

And it’s too late to do anything about it.

 

This is how a standardized test

Prepares you for life.

 

 

–#sonnetsfromthepleiades

is an undiscovered element.

We predict it,

calculate its mass and structure,

give it a symbol (Ha),

and seek a Philosopher’s Stone

to transmute our baser metals into it—

declaring it more precious than gold.

 

Accidently, we may glimpse it—there, in the gray liminal curve

where what we see brushes against what’s beyond the periphery—

but when we turn to take it in,

to see it full and radiant,

the unstable isotope of happiness evaporates into the everyday.

 

Heisenberg thought he saw something sub-atomic,

but knew he could not pin it down and know it all at once.

Happiness is that particle, that uncertain quantum blip,

that thing that we cannot grasp

without changing its momentum irrevocably.

 

Happiness is:

thick as a hopscotch chalk line,

heavy as a bubble bursting on a crack in the sidewalk;

its half-life is the first ride without training wheels,

the first warm press of a young girl’s lips and tongue.

Happiness neither was nor will be, only is—

when its snowflake lands on our teeth,

it melts in a moment, and we doubt if we caught it.

 

–sonnetsfromthepleiades

One of the most famous books of poetry from the Victorian era was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.  Several years ago, I created a blog playing off that name on a website where I liked to write humorous sonnets inspired by science fiction and fantasy artwork and post occasional articles, some of which you can find here.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to write poetry, but after a time, the website changed management and stopped doing the art-based writing prompts.  So, for a long time, I let the name Sonnets from the Pleiades (a combination of EBB’s title with the mythical sisters placed in a star cluster) lie fallow.

Recently, however, my mom passed away, which has made me think more and more about writing.  Mom loved to write, and in going through her things, I came across several things that I had written that she had kept.  So, in part, I decided to reknew my writing habit with a blog like this, in part, as a tribute to her.

Additionally, as noted elsewhere on the page, I still think sonnets are a good way to process one’s thoughts about the world–and let’s face it: today’s world could use a lot more thought…

So, there you have it.  Let me know your thoughts as well.

 

A Sonnet on Sonnets

The sonneteers once stood on honored heights;
Now, though, their names are known by just a few.
Their rhyming verses–measured, sharp, and tight–
Don’t thrill the masses as they used to do.

The observations in a sonnet may,
In just a thimble, hold the entire globe.
But people don’t care much for thought today,
Preferring lizard brains to frontal lobes.

I cannot hope to summarize the world
In fourteen lines of mediocre verse.
The poems that you find here just unfurl
The rolled-up thoughts I have, for good or worse.

But maybe putting thoughts in measured rhymes
Can bring some structure to chaotic times.