✍️💞NaPoWriMo 2024 – April’s write a poem a day💞✍️ Day 27💞✍️27/04/24

#NaPoWriMo

And now for our prompt – optional, as always!  Today we’d like to challenge you to write an “American sonnet.” What’s that? Well, it’s like a regular sonnet but . . . fewer rules? Like a traditional Spencerian or Shakespearean sonnet, an American sonnet is shortish (generally 14 lines, but not necessarily!), discursive, and tends to end with a bang, but there’s no need to have a rhyme scheme or even a specific meter. Here are a few examples:

• Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnet (10)
• Terence Hayes’s American Sonnet for the New Year
• Ted Berrigan’s Sonnet LXXXVIII

If you’d like more specific instructions for how to get started, Write 253 has a great “formula” prompt for an American sonnet, which you can find here.

Happy writing!

💜🩵💚💙❤️💛🧡💜🩵💚💙❤️💛

PHOENIX (An American Sonnet)

love should be as contented as a sleeping cat.
so why is it more like constantly running up the same hill?
rain clouds bursting overhead, nature’s tears mingle
with mine – the happiness of flowers in window boxes,
the sun on nearby red-tiled roofs causes me frustration.
my window frames a tree, green with buds and new life.
while I pine for a love that was never meant to be,
but it filled up my senses until they tingled with desire
and burst inside like a constellation of shining stars.
now I see the dark forest of pain, loss, and sorrow           are all my days to be spent bereft of that special love?
the one that will reside in my broken heart – dead embers.

surely, it only needs a spark to revive love once again
and I will rise like a phoenix full of fire and passion re-ignited

©🦊VixenOfVerse, 2024