Category Archives: LoSoRhyMo

For a while there it looked as if I wasn’t going to make my sonnet quota this year, but here’s the last one, just ahead of deadline. I was tossing up whether to write about my increasing deafness, or Yoko Ono’s exhibition at the MCA, or the way Eleanor Caron’s Booker prize-winning novel The Luminaries is getting so little promotion in the end-of-year lists in newspapers and bookshop reading guides. I settled for this:

Sonnet 14: November ends
I shopped, I read, I went to movies,
played with children, watched TV,
rode a train with weary juvies,
helped add a show to P’s CV,
stood in rain for climate action,
faced computer death distraction,
ruminated on the news,
tried to formulate some views:
all grist for my November rhyming
fourteen lines in Pushkin’s ways,
fourteen times in thirty days.
An hour to spare – precision timing –
I’ve got them done. Perhaps next year
the form of Petrarch, or Shakespeare.

As we headed for bed, home form a social evening, I wailed that I had to get a sonnet written but the well was dry. The Art Student, never one to let someone just moan, told me to get in touch with my inner rage about recent news headlines. So I came up with this in fairly short order:

Sonnet 12: Australia, 27 November 2013
When they were in opposition
they said no, no, no, no. No
one expects the Inquisition,
Spanish or otherwise, and so
we didn’t dream that once empowered
they’d really drag us back to Howard
and beyond, ditch Gonski, try
to bluff and bully SBY,
sack scientists, be kind to rorters,
snub climate talks, give boats to thugs,
tweet racist tweets, treat us like mugs.
As trusting lambs are led to slaughters
we chose them. They appal, amaze
the world in barely eighty days.

If I remember correctly the French for ‘crash’ in the context of computers is naufrager, which is also the word used when a ship wrecks.

Sonnet 11: How I got a new toy tool
Some virtual reef sank my computer
as it steamed on through the night.
Its kernel panic wasn’t cute or
pretty, nor its owner’s fright.
But I’d backed up, so very little
work was lost – two jots, one tittle.
I took it to a man in red,
who said the audio card was dead.
A woman in red T-shirt, Uppy,
charming smile, discreet tattoos,
helped dissipate my first-world blues.
Though I’m too old to be a yuppy
my heart leapt up when I did hold
a shiny new Mac, bought and sold.

The computer that died has featured in this blog at least once before. It survived four years after the disaster that befell it shortly before this photo was taken, and was already of a certain age then, so I guess it’s had a good innings.

Perhaps a snippet of narrative, which is after all what this form of sonnet was invented for:

Sonnet 10: Suburban travelling companions
Corinda, Sherwood, Graceville, Chelmer:
Tattooed boys with half shaved heads
and desperado airs that tell more
than they know use seats as beds.
One sleeps. ‘I hope he bought three tickets,’
tuts a greybeard, ‘makes me sick.’ It’s
soon Taringa, then Toowong.
Two boys share buds. A chinkling song
confirms the greybeard’s irriration.
Unplugged, they chat about the dole
and meetings to observe parole.
The sleeper wakes for Central Station,
which comes like dawn to end his night.
There tattoos, beard, and I alight.

Enough with trying to squeeze a thought into 14 lines of roughly 8 syllables each. Today, an impressionistic moment:

Sonnet 9: South Bank
Thursday morning in the city
at the Ice-Cream-Brand-Name Beach
and Other-Brand-Name Fountains, pretty
children with one adult each –
mothers, aunts, great aunts, grandmothers
a dad or two – and sundry others
deploy the sunny Brisbane day
to better ends than making hay.
A squad of teenage girls come jogging,
uniformed, with in-ear buds.
A skateboard ollies, grinds and scuds.
I sit and eavesdrop, rhyming, blogging:
‘Mummy, sunscreen!’ ‘Splash me!’ ‘What?’
‘Oh my god, how can you not?’