The prompt for the day is a favorite of my writing twin, but for me it’s always a challenge. Today was called Sonnet Sunday, and the challenge was to write …. Wait for it… a sonnet!

A traditional sonnet is 14 lines long, with each line having ten syllables that are in iambic pentameter (where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable). Blah blah blah… read between the lines that I’m not feeling in the Shakespeare way today. Still the theme was love and I tried my best, but what you see is what I got.

I chose a more modern version of the sonnet. I chose a curtal sonnet. The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems. It is an eleven-line (or, more accurately, ten-and-a-half-line) sonnet, this the name “curtal”—a curtailed or contracted sonnet.

This type of sonnet refers to a sonnet of 11 lines rhyming abcabc dcbdc or abcabc dbcdc with the last line a tail, or half a line. I’m not sure at all that I did it “right”, but the practice was engaging and valuable as always.

Yes I know…

Some of you are thinking “whatever, Carla”…trust me I feel the same but I press on with the practice because it brings me joy. So… here is my rather interesting take on a love sonnet to a thief. Enjoy!

Love

Perchance one day she’ll catch the old thief
who slipped and stole—tip toe hush hush—the wind that rose
beneath her sails. She’ll jaunt away with jubilee
on a junket of her own motif.
She found not a soul had noticed her wilted woes—
instead the slippery folk strained their necks to see.
Ranting relief brought rancor and rage;
after carefully crafted and curated glee,
she discovered the power of poems and prose. 
Freedom fell and she escaped that golden-gilded cage—
         she found her sanity.

—Carla Jeanne