[This is the Petrarchan sonnet I wrote tonight, Christmas Eve. Hmm. That was in 2012 I started it on the coach ride to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle and finished during the organ music preceding the service. Each year on Christmas Eve and while sitting in whatever place where we are attending the ceremony, I re-read Truman Capote’s
“A Christmas Memory.” It is the most beautiful, happy, and sad piece of nonfiction he ever wrote.]
O, That We Were There!
Or,
Future Perfect Pretense
We cling to our lost pleasures, those we had
Before that agony or boredom came.
We hold on like a blossom with no name
Which wants its life, refusing to be sad.
We clutch our latest pleasures in our chests,
Breasts made of bone and flesh and not of wood
Bound hard in iron with lock, and if we could
We’d fend off newer pleasures with blade jests.
.Of course we cannot keep delights that life
..Has swept from us to what we name the past.
…Life will not send them back, so we pretend
….That if our minds and souls employ that knife
…..Of laughing heart (too like despair, aghast
……At us) we’ll make our futures backward bend.