Plague Sonnet

Plague Sonnet

A bite of the flea and the plague is caught;

what he sent away always came home to him.

Tho she begged for a healer, she got what she got.

With fifty snuffed candles the room stayed dim.

From a book of dead suns he read out the shade

and the scream that whimpers before it goes.

She stole new eyes but they soon were greyed

as turquoise fevered in a cold-played flow

of impossible truths, of believable lies.

He put traps in the trees, blood on the stones

with his limp blue gaze where the Kingdom dies;

there could be no bridge in a rainbow of bones,

just the smile of the mouth-pit scarring the lawn,

and one last mistake, to make a girl gone.

~May 2015

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Challenge: Bout-Rimés

Bjorn Rudberg (Bjorn Rudberg's Writings) asks us to play a game which evolves a sonnet from given end-rhymes. I have done what I could, though I am not much of a sonneteer. I had no luck with the words, 'glade'  and 'tones' so they have been altered--apologies.

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After The Fever

 

After The Fever

The south wind knows I'm not the same

since the fever, re-shaped

from smoke, flower-dust and partings,

lust drowned, all melt and gape;

never

been as strong, forever

starting

at sounds inside the wall

a clatter fox-foot quick that came

when things began to fall.

The east wind knows I've never had

any man who turned me 
in his hand like the fever, but
the breath that burned me
leaving,
how it came out cleaving,
so cut
the mind  to clarity,
so scoured clean both good and bad--
that is a parity.

~June 2014

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Play It Again Challenge

Kerry unearths three excellent former Toads memes for us to play with this weekend., a revisit of one of Izy's photo prompts, a particularly excellent Fireblossom Friday, and, for me the one impossible to resist: one of her superlative form challenges, the Robert Herrick Stanza. As always,Kerry, this was a challenge in every sense.

Photo: Eyelid to Eye, copyright joyannjones 2012-2014