Petrarch: Sonnet CCLXIX

1

Broken is the high column and green laurel tree
that formed in shade over my brooding mind.
I have lost what I do not hope to find
in the north wind or south or any sea.

You took from me, Death, my double treasure,
that made me live in joy and step proudly.
Not earth nor empire can restore it to me,
nor eastern jewel, nor gold, for all its power.

But in accepting that this has to be
what can I do but live with my soul's sadness,
eyes in tears always and a downcast face?

Oh life of ours, apparently so lovely,
how quickly, in a morning, we can lose
what years of suffering have won for us.

- WS Merwin, 1990s

2

& no living writer can join her
Walking up & down Oxford Street
& if you look at me too     I am how
Music died in (you name the date)
Geezers in capes
Have wrecked our ship & this language
You can close both my eyes now
& blow out the candles
Like a love of the east
& the crushing of modernism
Touching knees to symbolize romance
In a scene otherwise lacking
Proclaiming the triumph of compassion
Acting = reality if you believe in it too
As perhaps still she sees me
Just in case
the heart is most broken by joy
& with a crack happens out of itself
only on the most polluted of days
ozone or high pollen count
You split the details of her eyebrow
Silence & big leg so often that there is
I am waving this hankie
She is dead now really dead so
Not like in books
Where the dead are
But in life where the dead aren't
Except for Walt Disney

- Tim Atkins, 2014

3

the west wind blows through naturalism
displacing narrative & messing up
all the scattered oddments on the table
thereby helping fructify the structure

featuring Venus in a laurel bush
& Mercury seeking to stick his stick
through foliage & cloud straight into heaven
good luckwith that o god of messages

the women who are dancing seem to say
you're reaching in quite the wrong direction
the forms we're making show a better way

to integrate your being with the world
treading with grace to the music of time
but watch that little bastard with his bow

- Peter Hughes, 2015