We learned about Sonnets today.
The Italian, Spenserian, and the English –
Sing-songy, loving and full of word play.
Sometimes I pine to myself and wish
I could write a wondrous poem for all to read.
Unfortunately, it is just not the case.
The lines come to me at a tortoise’s speed.
I scribble, I stumble, I omit and erase.

A rough draft emerges, hated and wrong.
The rhymes are average, the meter is off.
The whole thing sounds like a bad 80’s song.
If you were to read it – you’d scoff.

So I ask the question that poem was supposed to state:
Will you be my Semi-Formal date?

No lovesick lad ever poured out his heart
To a Scantron®©™ card and its suave machine
Posed seductively in brushed aluminum
In a smoky corner of the faculty commons

Or with a thundering Number Two scribed
A manifesto that menaced the world
(But bubbled carefully within the squares)
And ground it through a Scantron®©™ 888

For indeed

Moses brought not Scantron®©™ down from Sinai
To teach God’s laws through an electric eye

Whose art are thou?
Who is your creator?
'cause I've traced you in every poem and each sculptor,

Were you in Rumi's mind when he wrote, “we are the mirror as well as face in it"

Or In Mir's when he remarked-
"love is the beloved and lover too"
Who art thou?
Where you dwell?

I've seen you in Shakespearean tales
Are you Rosalind or Juliet
Being the centre of the play who dazed audience,
Or one of the long poetry of Milton and Elliott,

Who art thou?
Where thy home?

Are you Beatrice whom Dante
wrote in Divine comedy,
Or Helen, the unparalleled beauty
Or the Monalisa , a dream that Vinci's brush brought on canvass,
Or Kalidasa's mesmerizing Shakuntala

Who art thou ?
Where thy abode ?

Are you a Spenserian sonnet
Or Donne's wit and conceit?
Is it you who shot former "thousand arrows by eyes"
And became latter's "all states and a world ",
Who art thou?

This world is in you
Or you in this world?

You are art
Or art is from you?

Doubts are in hundred

Answer only one-

Any book I read,
The words I write,
All the poems I recite

In all my night’s dream
There's somewhere I find you embedded in them,

It's like all the great poets, artisans had already known you,
And carved you in pages and stones for me.

Whose art are thou?
Who is your creator?
'cause I've traced you in every poem and each sculptor,

Were you in Rumi's mind when he wrote, “we are the mirror as well as face in it"

Or In Mir's when he remarked-
"love is the beloved and lover too"
Who art thou?
Where you dwell?

I've seen you in Shakespearean tales
Are you Rosalind or Juliet
Being the centre of the play who dazed audience,
Or one of the long poetry of Milton and Elliott,

Who art thou?
Where thy home?

Are you Beatrice whom Dante
wrote in Divine comedy,
Or Helen, the unparalleled beauty
Or the Monalisa , a dream that Vinci's brush brought on canvass,
Or Kalidasa's mesmerizing Shakuntala

Who art thou ?
Where thy abode ?

Are you a Spenserian sonnet
Or Donne's wit and conceit?
Is it you who shot former "thousand arrows by eyes"
And became latter's "all states and a world ",
Who art thou?

This world is in you
Or you in this world?

You are art
Or art is from you?

Doubts are in hundred

Answer only one-

Any book I read,
The words I write,
All the poems I recite

In all my night’s dream
There's somewhere I find you embedded in them,

It's like all the great poets, artisans had already known you,
And carved you in pages and stones for me.