Gwen Harwood Acrostic Sonnets
Gwen Harwood
Eloisa to Abelard Solace and hope depart. God’s finger traces on fields of frozen darkness: You shall find loss, absence, nothing. Walking on the wind Our lord speaks to a crowd of foolish faces, no face that is not mine, while filtering through gaps, honeycombs of memory you seem but the faint ghost of a remembered dream. Unveiled by pain, I bleed. My wound is you. Lost in the well of space, my spirit hears “Lucis creator optime…” The choir entreats God, out of tune. I join my voice to theirs. Nightfall’s immense. I taste my tears. I reap the harvest of my own desire. No heart escapes the torment of its choice. Abelard to Eloisa Far above memory’s landscape let the fears unlatched from thundering valleys of your mind carry their lightning. Stare the sun up. Find kinetic heat to scorch your mist of tears. All that vision limned by night appears loose in dismembering air: think yourself blind. Louder than death in headlines the unkind elements hawk my passion: stop your ears. Deny me now. Be Doubting Thomas. Thrust into my side the finger of your grief. Tell me I am an apparition frayed out of the tattered winding-sheet of lust. Recall no ghost of love. Let no belief summon me, fleshed and bleeding, from the shade. Part of a great Australian tradition of literary hoax. |
Now that's poetry. I think they're lovely (as poetry, especially the first, though both are fine).
Cheers, John Update: thank you for introducing me to Gwen Harwood. |
Proves that poetry has many ways of getting its message across.
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