Was this a class assignment? I do not know.
Invention
(Shakespearean sonnet)
“How strange that clouds can sail the deeps and heights
Of lucent skies when they are weighted down
With a volcano-visaged rain, whose mights
Hurl thunderbolts and hail with blackened frown!
What phantom chain can bind them to blue mist?”
Thus muses a youth whose spirit clamored mad
To penetrate unburdened space; to tryst
With stars, and draw on custom’s wondering pad
New patterns heretofore untraced. Once thought,
From wood like gossamer his fingers shaped
A model ship and trembled when it sought
To try its wings. Earth’s cynics laughed and gaped.
Today, ten thousand ships sail heaven’s seas
To match the dream that youth flung to the breeze.
Evelyn Coffey
Evelyn's life was heavy. Her spirit, somehow, could be light. On the other hand, those who saw her then, and all the way through her life, perceived her as light a a cloud, floating somehow above it all, in her heaven-haven; they did not know the weight she carried.
ReplyDelete"Thus muses a youth" who dares to find a way to fly, to fly in spite of the weight of reality. And she did, all through her life. how wonderful, Pat, that you draw us up from our too-busy, too, weighted down lives, so that we may remember to aspire to flight as she did. Her poetry reminds us of our own wings; Evelyn smiles us out of our nests.