For ViV: A Sonnet

Many of you will have followed through the years, ViV’s challenge to me to write a full-blown, honest-to-God sonnet. As she often told me: ‘… please don’t think you can get away with calling them sonnets, even if you stretch the definition as a ‘modern’ sonnet. Fourteen lines do not a sonnet make nor four lines a volta. It is absolutely NO use counting syllables. You must count only the stresses, otherwise the rhythm simply doesn’t work.’

Yes, it has taken me this long, and even so I wait until ViV pronounces whether I may, in fact, term this as such. It started as an Elizabethan in structure and shifted into an Italian. Untitled, as yet.

 

What is the thing that passes in the night,
that as I tread the side-walks of behind,
hides something that I wish but cannot find,
the shadow I connect with out of sight?
When day arrives and I let in the light
— on looking I can see that out of mind
means only you have kept me undefined —
I pause to see myself again in flight.
I must not walk old ways but look my fill
then move ahead, where life is not askew;
forget old heartbreaks, all that was untrue,
and dream of when my fate is my free will.
Yet, when I think all old is made anew,
I find the doors I shut are open still.

 

ViV, any critiquing appreciated. I do know it needs revising, but figured if I didn’t post, I could revise forever.