Fragile

              

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

“…very witty and intelligent and divinely beautiful….But, alas, very fragile.”  Siegfried Sassoon writing to Henry Festing-Jones about Stephen Tennant

Because the universe is doomed to die

(The prime blue stars the shortest lived of all),

Because all matter, light and warmth will fly

Away to stretched oblivion, the small

Thing men name love waits fated, threaped—of course.

It doesn’t matter if the young man wastes

Away with illness.  Destiny looms coarse

For everything.  A poet’s luscious tastes

In young male skin are trapped in threatened breath

No matter how much beauty chests contain.

To prettier or wittier comes death.

He’ll vanish without so much as a stain.

  Then hero soldier poet disappears

    In Rome’s confessional, unmanned by tears.

Phillip Whidden

[This sonnet is part of a so far unposted sonnet sequence about the life, loves and literature of Siegfried Sassoon.]