Deforestation Pushes Animals To Eat Virus-laden Bat Poo
This would be horrifying if it happened to me,
(Also quite upsetting if it only happened to you),
But as long as it's just animals, I'm OK to let it be,
To turn my sights on other news, say, a continent away
Such as Russia Defiant Over US Aid To Ukraine
Or Three Suspected Spies Arrested In Germany,
Or Wild Fires Out Of Control In Human Brain.
The latter is just my imagination
But burnout is a real thing, as real as hyper-tension.
The real story is the plight of the beasts and deforestation.
Some incredible madness has co-opted our attention.
But the truth is all these stories doth intertwine.
I can only hope that someday soon our souls will come online.
........................
How I started writing sonnets late in life
I know I must have tried my hand at writing sonnets throughout my years of writing poetry but I never enjoyed it as much as when I began to experiment with the form half way through my sixties, inspired by John Hawkins who writes reviews for and is a frequent contributor to OpEdNews. He is a very smart, extremely well read, bitingly funny man. His writer's persona is a unique unlikely concretion of intellectual and anti-intellectual, which makes me wonder what he is really like as a person to sit down with across a small table on a back deck. He announced (I think it was right before Covid) (If John sees this, I hope he corrects me) that he would write a sonnet a day for a year?? . . . As I write that, it sounds incredible, and super-human . . . I believe he almost succeeded but had to space them out before the year had passed, but I think he got over 200 sonnets out of the self-dare. Anyway, I found myself inspired by his audacious quest. What I learned was, sticking to the sonnet form (AB / AB, CD / CD, EF / EF, GG) seems to have a paradoxical affect on my brain: It bridles my imagination while giving it free rein. (The expression "free rein" originated as horseback-riding jargon referring to the act of holding the reins loosely so as to allow the horse to freely move along at its own pace and in its desired direction.) So, within the strict form I found greater freedom than when I am writing in free form. The horse takes the lead. In a free form poem, I would never compare the poem to a horse. The poem wouldn't stand for it. The poem is just the poem, a process. With the sonnet, what you wind up with is a sonnet. That is, when I write a sonnet, I am climbing onto a horse and what I am riding continues to be a horse. It's not a chimera. If you don't experience something like what I have described in my own process of writing a sonnet, but just something boring, to show off that you can do it, that is just about the form and you. What would be the point? So, thanks John, for waking me, albeit late in life, to the joy of writing sonnets.
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