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Nocturne, A Sonzal

Nouns go into hiding. I wake in the middle of the night

And cannot remember the name of this year, this night.

 

Defying gravity, nouns percolate upward, seeking light.

They lose their way in the chaos of dreams each night.

 

Springing through curtains of sleep, amused by my fright,

Hydrangea is a word that shimmies out of reach all night.

 

You know: Looks like a bathing cap, turns blue at the sight  

Of sulfur added to soil, seems to catch the moon every night.

 

Hydrangeas love early sun, wilt as it reaches its height,

Both as hardy and delicate as neural connections at night.

 

Perhaps you linger too long, tethered            To loss, over how one word can fade.

Fearful of how your father lost his way         To memory, that nightmare won’t fade.

Trina, observe, when does the tie                   Between object and word fade?

  

Published in: Fireweed, Winter 2022.

 

 

 

 

 

I write poetry to form the way I cook to a recipe. It’s a nice suggestion, but let’s get creative. Try a little substitution. Make it milder. Make it wilder. As to measuring? A pinch of this, a palm full of that. . . . Experience and lots of practice have freed me. I’ve discovered you’re unlikely to repeat your failures, even less likely your successes. (The turkey stew I cooked for Christmas Eve- divine. Only it was chicken not turkey, dried cranberries not raisins, paprika not curry powder, and no hot sauce.)

 

Take the sonzal for instance. Amit Majmudar created the form, a blend of a sonnet and a ghazal. The first one I read was “Solitary Sonzal” https://ecotonemagazine.org/poetry/solitary-sonzal/ . Forms new to me fill the air with frission. I searched for the recipe. Not finding one, I turned to observations:

 

·        Fourteen lines in couplets

·        an octet left justified

·        the turn

·        a sestet with shorter lines and right justified

·        word repetition and end rhyme

·        writer’s name in last couplet

 

Two activities often spark new poems- my morning shower or a walk, often in the company of our dog Porter. I was already primed with excitement for this new form, and this walk was filled with Summer flowers. The name of the one that explodes in our neighborhood had escaped me for decades, in spite of the fact that both of my grandmothers had grown them. Grandma Baker called them snowball bushes. I sought a mnemonic to solve the issue. I said, Hi! to each one I met.

 

Not every sonzal by Amit Majmudar follows all the rules, every time. My Nocturne, A Sonzal, follows many of the rules I derived for the form. But is it a sonzal? In the original draft, I right justified the last three couplets.

 

Perhaps you linger too long, tethered

To loss, over how one word can fade.

 

Fearful of how your father lost his way

To memory, that nightmare won’t fade.

 

Trina, observe, when does the tie

Between object and word fade?

 

But the layout left my uneasy, perhaps because the subject of my father’s dementia makes me uneasy.  First I turned each of those couplets into one line and treated them as one stanza. Too ordinary? By turning each couplet into one line, with a medial caesura, the emotional weight of the poem rested on the last lines. It felt right to move from tethered across a small space to loss, to keep the father who had lost his way closer to memory, to try to tie object and word visually. Fade gained emphasis, both visually and aurally, each time it landed on top of the one before.

 

Majmudar says, The sonzal, ringing changes, rings in chance by coaxing two poetic forms to dance. I write them with a perfect loss of will. The form creates the vacuum I must fill. https://www.literarymatters.org/12-3-a-lens-that-doesnt-veil-the-view-amit-majmudar-in-conversation/  One of my primary pleasures in working to any form is exposing what I have to say while filling that vacuum.

 

 

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