Lenten Sonnet #40

Change

The moon’s recused itself. It hangs in the sky

Like any other ceiling light to which

Your thinning blood has learned not to reply.

Still, in the cool blue evening, slicing a peach,

Pressing the knife down through the dripping sweet

Orange-pink opulence, heady as the drone

Of flies at midsummer, you almost meet

Yourself again, that humid year the telephone

Was always going to ring, and didn’t. That

Time when hope was its own realization,

And any house you passed at dusk was lit for you.

Now your own house spills light into the street.

Your children come home here. You've become a nation

Which outlives you. Which is your old life made new.

*****

I wish I could have thought of something more actually, obviously Lenten for the fortieth sonnet of this Lenten season, but after a Saturday of making Italian Easter bread with ten little girls at church, then coming home to plan my lesson on the Mass for First Communion class and  oversee the bath queue, then going back to church for the blessing of a friend's marriage, then going to the Bi-Lo to buy dog food for the putatively stray dog hanging out with my kids on the church playground (because the other option, lobbied for in some quarters, was to put the dog in the car and take him home with us, to the certain dismay of the dog we already have, to whom all the couches belong), then remembering that we actually hadn't eaten any more than the putatively stray dog supposedly had in hours and hours and so going out to dinner unplannedly and getting home late . . .

Anyway, this sonnet is what turned up, like a putatively stray dog. And here we see the first and last and definitive lesson of the Great Lenten Sonnet Writing:  you don't get to choose what putatively stray dog appears on your doorstep. Whatever turns up turns up, and either you don't feed it or you do.

This really is it for the sonnets for now. A blessed Holy Week and a joyful Eastertide to all.