Sonnet
Alone in a foreign city
having a drink.
Missing you.
Nursing the drink for a while.
I heard a familiar song
coming over the water.
I said what if we named
our baby Sonnet, later;
at the time you couldn't hear me.
I sat on the dock
underneath vast gantries
and felt an antique crack
in my heart.
But I figured I would make it.
from the book ARMY OF GIANTS/ Wave Books
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
I wrote this about sitting on the docks in Trieste, Italy. The song coming across the water was Sonnet by The Verve. There was a time I tried to convince my wife that if our first child was a girl, we should name her Sonnet. Luckily he was a boy. 'Antique cracks' is borrowed from my friend Matthew. I just needed it for a second; I gave it right back.

Matthew Rohrer on "Sonnet"
cover of Making a Living by Rosalie Moffett
"Bear to Look": Ryan Teitman On Rosalie Moffett’s Making a Living

"Moffett’s poems, on the other hand, aren’t cannon blasts; they’re scalpels. What she’s attempting—and accomplishing—is to use the sharpness of her language to immerse us in the unease of navigating our present moment. And in that unease, we can recognize the beauty, not of the ideology that’s working on us day and night, but of everything else. A mother’s purple irises. A shoreline glowing with phosphorescent plankton. A woman holding a newborn, wondering if a window 'imagines / it has made / what it holds.'"

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
What Sparks Poetry:
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. on Drafts 


"What was this? Where did it come from? How did it get there? Had it not been in my notebook, in my handwriting, between two journal entries that I did recall writing, I would have tried to dismiss it somehow. But there it was. It would not be trifled with, so I put aside the various poetry experiments and series on which I’d been working and stepped into its weird lyric space-time of After the operation....
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency