English Matters

Because a poem be like a pearl in the midst of your papers, findeth inscribed below another offering in the style of John of the Donne wherein Master Zachary Sandri compareth love to your modern device of moving portraits.


Celluloid (A Kiss in Times Square)
(A Petrarchan Sonnet Inspired by John Donne)

by Zachary Sandri

I’ve been to see my love a dozen times,

and each time features of her flesh do change.

In all my searching, love hath rearranged,

yet every time my mistress stands sublime.

Rosy cheeks reflect mirrors free from grime.

Spirit, here confined; images estranged.

In mine hungry eyes, a body is exchanged

for celluloid, my heart’s great petty crime.

On screens in cinemas my love doth wait.

We share a kiss twixt dancing Times Square lights

or lay prostrate in emerald fields of fate.

Alas, with absent warmth it feels not right.

My love in paper lights doth glow and gleam.

My lips press up against the movie screen.

The students of the olde history of the much esteemed literature of Britain be writing poems in the style of John of the Donne this finaltide.  And forsooth they are most deserving of an audience more broad and be-steeped in learning than their instructress, and for this reason find inscribed below the words of Hannah Coble, who hath wrapped the mystery of love within a comparison to the new-fangled device of minstrelsy y-cleped I-pod.


The Bottle

by Hannah Coble

Send back my iPod home to me,

So that I may have music while I’m at sea;

I’ve nothing left to listen but the waves,

Who afford one tune,

Come sunlight or moon,

That it were

You prefer

Keep it then, else our playlists due their graves.

Send back my yellow earphones then,

Which we shared time and time again;

Though given their use of you and they,

To divvy him,

By use of them,

And ru’n both

But I’m loathe

To do more than toss, so keep them anyway.

Neither iPod nor earphones do I want back,

To listen and endure and remind of that I lack;

Too easy it’d be to lose myself in song,

As I was lost,

In you then crossed,

They would too

Empty as you

Would merely linger, as another you did wrong.