Daily Discipline

A lot of my daily sonnets are pretty bad.  But they hone my craft at verse; they hone my ear.  This evening I said to my husband: “I turned your oatmeal off, I think it’s done,” and noticed the iambic pentameter.  Or, to take it further (as I was compelled):

“I turned your oatmeal off, I think it’s done,”

I said, and noticed five feet of iambic

I went to give a prodding to my son

Who lay, near comatose, under a blanket

The evening ticks towards its predicted end

The deep and wondrous thoughts I hoped to capture

Keep flitting off beyond my reach again

Leaving me rhymeless, stuck, devoid of rapture

At last the sticky veil of sleep is drawn

I’ll seek more brightness when the night is gone.

(Not a full sonnet, that, but I had already written a full one - even worse - so I was OK with leaving it partial.)

There are other benefits to the practice.  The search for what to write, pen poised on blank journal page, dated on top and thus requiring that something be written, sends me scanning for feelings, thoughts, whatever stands out.  So the sonnets become a chronicle of my days and thoughts, sometimes mundane, sometimes something more.  I find I need to write about what’s up now, though there is some temporal flexibility. Now can be this moment as I type, or it can be anything in my memory where the thought or feeling was strong enough to leave a spike, such that I can go back and relive it.  

I prefer reliving the high points, recapturing the lofty thoughts.  But yesterday there was a low point, actually left over from Sunday, and I found that I had to address it, to clear the landscape, in order for other things to be able to emerge.  It wasn’t a deep low; I had pretty much pushed it aside, but the fact that I needed to put it in a sonnet proved that I needed to address it in my thought, put it to bed, to re-establish my accustomed tranquility.

I left the potluck quickly and alone

I didn’t want to stay and try to chat

I felt let down by church and on my own

No one to cherish me or what I said

I was a bit embarrassed by my speech

I didn’t do as well as I have done

Didn’t practice, read it, stumbled, lurched

Didn’t tap the knowing of the One.

Not awful, but I didn’t make connection

Failed to convey the spirit I had felt

Spent too much time on other’s loose suggestions

Too little on the light the Spirit dealt

Or maybe it just wasn’t the right thing

Square peg, round hole, a message without zing.

©Wendy Mulhern