Revisiting My Very First Sonnet

     What formalist can forget the first sonnet he or she ever wrote? Mine came as an assignment for senior English. I can't remember the name of my teacher (as I recall, she wasn't that great a teacher), but I clearly recall that she only required we stick to either the Shakespearean or the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, but she didn't expect meter (much more difficult than rhyme). The day we handed our sonnets in, our teacher perched on her desk and read them all out loud, but without revealing their authors. They were, one after another, half-hearted, jokey, disrespectful attempts, and I could see her becoming both discouraged and angry with each poem. Finally, she came to mine. She began reading it in a weary voice, expecting it to be yet another jokey attempt. At the end of the fourth line, she paused in surprise and looked at the class with a relieved smile. When she finished, she asked, "Did you all understand what the poem was saying?" Then she read it again.

     I think that was the moment my childhood desire to write was cemented.

     Incredibly, after all these years, I still remember that sonnet word for word, even though all written copies of it are long lost. A few years ago, I revised it, primarily giving it meter and polishing up the language. I also changed the rhyme scheme from Petrarchan to Shakespearean. Many of my friends have read both versions; some actually prefer the original for its simplicity and youthful voice.

Small Talk (1977)

As we weave our web of words, staring,
Gazing out the window with private dreams
Locked in our minds, how strange it seems
That here we are, speaking, but not really sharing.
Too tired to listen, not in the least caring
What the other says, we think of schemes
To escape this farce of masks and screens,
To rid ourselves of the frozen smiles we're wearing.
Instead, we go on with our pointless chat,
Fidgeting uncomfortably with each prolonged pause,
While searching desperately for some silly sentence.
What would it be like if we simply sat,
Without feeling so obliged to the dubious cause
Of prim convention and social eloquence?


The Art of Conversation (2010)

We weave a silken thread while private dreams
unfurl behind the diptych of our eyes
and cool façades of polished smiles; we scheme
to flee this habitat where broidered lies
and glib embellishments of fact reside.
Instead, we chatter on. Our platitudes
will serve to mask the homeliness inside.
But as the thread winds round the attitudes
we have so deftly wrought, beneath the pause
inevitably born, we ponder what
would come about if—artlessly—we sat,
unburdened from our duty to the cause
of weaving (for convention's dubious sake)
a thread that only truth could ever break.

© Leticia Austria