Sonnet (Billy Vs Will) Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

(after Billy Collins and Shakespeare's Sonnet 106)

When in the chronicle of modern times
I see sonnets described in terms of length
As if their worth were defined by how many lines
Some would-be Bard can tease from his ball-point pen,
I stand like a time-lost weary broken soul
And gaze at pages of unstructured, unrhyming stuff
That somehow claims to have poetry as its goal
When to my eyes presents something trite and rough
And ask myself if this is what Petrarch had in mind
When he labored over his tightly-structured verse
Or if any poet of my time could have then divined
A day when poetry would be so sadly cursed
As to become no more than witty anecdotes
That fall upon the ear like so many untuned notes!