Sonnet 1 – Beauty

What brush could score to canvas your design,
Being, as sight itself, a miracle?
It's lines would mock what nature did define
When sculpting, what I claim to be, it's pinnacle.
Alas, my trite, inept, attempt at verse
Suffers no charge of taste before the crowd,
For if the situation were reverse
And you drawn from my lines, there’d be none proud.
Yet one cannot be held to ill account
For playing with the fire of word and rhyme
When glancing ‘pon a vision none surmount
And wishing to preserve it for a time.
Forgive me, then, each bumbling line that tries
To paint your perfect beauty with their lies.

Sonnet 2 - Sorrow

What language could define the fallen tear
And paths it took to reach its settled pond,
Where on the way, absorbed, each grief and fear
Congeals with melancholy's solemn bond.
The syntax buckles, bursting with conceit
That ever words experience evince,
Yet knowing what is lost in our defeat
We coax each line to pliant ears convince.
For, for that sullen drop, I will defy
The stone-cut limitations of the scribes,
And score my requiem upon the lie
That with each note the truth my will describes.
There is no other path my tears can trace
Than down th' unyielding gullies of this face.

Sonnet 3 - Awe

The brightest castle borne on Laputian winds
Shines with the supercilious glare of fiction,
Promising treasures reality rescinds
In keeping tight its coarse, ascetic diction.
The sky with endless stars will bribe the eyes,
Yet, nonetheless, we trade for canvassed myth,
Stirring our hearts with ostentatious dyes
Designed to pierce the soul's distended pith.
But here the wonder-wounded seal their fall
When sieging life, where beauty's truth unfurled
Would tawdry palettes shame enough to gall
Adventurers intent to drink the world.
The hoary Earth may dry the ardent mind,
Yet of its touch no craft has yet to find.