a little room in a house set aflame

The sonnet is my favorite poetic form. I can make a pretty good case for the villanelle, and in general poems that fuck with formalism often speak to me. But there's just nothing like a sonnet, and despite being a very tight form in many ways, it's so adaptable and can do so much. Here are (for April 7 and April 9) two very different sonnets.

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

—Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison"]" from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, 2018, and originally published in Poetry magazine, 2017.

*

Amor, de grano a grano, de planeta a planeta,
la red del viento con sus países sombríos,
la guerra con sus zapatos de sangre,
o bien el día y la noche de la espiga.

Por donde fuimos, islas o puentes o banderas,
violines del fugaz otoño acribillado,
repitió la alegría los labios de la copa,
el dolor nos detuvo con su lección de llanto.

En todas las repúblicas desarrollaba el viento
su pabellón impune, su glacial cabellera,
y luego regresaba la flor a sus trabajos.

Pero en nosotros nunca se calcinó el otoño.
Y en nuestra patria inmóvil germinaba y crecía
el amor con los derechos del rocío.


Love, from seed to seed, from planet to planet,
the wind with its net through the darkening nations,
war with its bloody shoes,
or even the day, with a thorny night.

Wherever we went, islands or bridges or flags,
there were the violins of the fleeting autumn, bullet-laced;
happiness echoing at the rim of the wineglass;
sorrow detaining us, with its lesson of tears.

Through all those republics the wind whipped—
its arrogant pavillions, its glacial hair;
it would return the flowers, later, to their work.

But no withering autumn ever touched us.
In our stable place a love sprouted, grew:
as rightfully empowered as the dew.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XXVIII from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).