A Sighing Sonnet Poem by Cherylyn Vardi

Syllables plunge into an ancient songbook
Octaves and sestets of obsessive love
Perusing Petrarch's Canzoniere
Iambic portrayals of Laura de Noves

Shakespeare loves on the lines of a couplet
Spencer stanzas virtue in his Faerie Queene rife
Milton sonneteers in Italian and English
Ordaining poetry as a testament of life

Sighing sonnets mourn days that are dying
Modern metaphors taunt metered lines
Poetic form breaks on shores that are tiding
Free verse penetrates breakwaters of rhyme

Patterns and principles shape moments of memory
Vivid vocabulary sculpts images of thought
Free verse liberates incarcerated poetry
Criterion chaos and linear fraught

Freedom exists when bound by convention
The mind can perceive through rhythm and form
Movements of Modernism set on breaking tradition
Merely replacing it with contemporary norms