Two Sonnets

by David Solway (May 2020)

Woman Draped in an Orange Shawl, Richard E. Miller, 1930s

 

 

Insomnia

 

 

There’s nothing like an unexpected rhyme

or the fabular solace of a grand

father clock’s errant note on the third chime

or the last stubborn particle of sand

in the hourglass’s narrow waist

to serve a fledgling hope beyond the day’s

closing stroke at midnight. The moment’s graced

by unanticipated beauty, blaze

of sudden recognitions when they strike

between the broken light of time’s elidings

and the meditative dark. Nothing like

the drift of wind that brings you tidings

to disambiguate the world’s surds—

a maple thick with ticking hummingbirds.

 

 

 

 

 

Hundred Acre Wood

 

 

How I crave your numinous pillow-talk,

the muted accents growing more pronounced

as time plods by and silences the clock

so that I feel like Tigger now re-bounced

cavorting in the Hundred Acre Wood

of Love’s enchanted plot where dreams abide.

Patient, I wait for that sweet change of mood,

the moment when you put the book aside

and Winnie goes to sleep and Eeyore snores.

And then we have the Wood all to ourselves.

This the moment when the night restores

its ambient promise, and body delves

into body, and knows the Wood’s soft spell,

a floral tuft in a beckoning dell.

 

 

 

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David Solway’s latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House Publishing, 2019, London. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.

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