Written April 2025
Prompt: Write a sonnet in any form you like, whether Shakespearean, Petrarchan, or Spenserian. (This is an Italian sonnet)
When in silent sighs of ethereal breath
waning nature turns quietly from the light
and retreats into a hidden enclave tight,
is it hiding from its own demise? Death
might be some big bully that lurks unimpressed,
even as nature’s colors flash bright
and proud. But perhaps it is not death whose fright
turns the leaves brown into seasonal rest—
—sees the endless autumn into universal stasis.
For we know not the elusive circuits which
govern the lives of our once-green friends—
—companions—and their eyeless faces
that look on in eternal indifference and bliss.
But if not to evade Death, then what do they intend?
Inspirations and Comments
Quite simply, this is a fourteen-line Italian sonnet written in response to a prompt that simply instructed me to write any sonnet. This was done shortly after studying the various sonnet forms, and their respective rhyme schemes. As I was coming up with the idea for this poem, I knew I wanted to write about something nature-related, but I wasn’t quite sure about the direction the poem would take (as always) until I got deep into it.
Like many of my poems from around this time period, Evading Death?! frequently uses enjambment, which is the termination of a sentence in the middle of a line, and the starting of a new one before the end of that line. I also mixed some more colloquial terms (big bully) with surprisingly meditative words and phrase structures (“endless autumn into universal stasis”). I feel that this contrast helps to emphasize the poem’s focus on nature suddenly becoming sleepy and gray after a long season of vivid green.
This poem owes its rather unusual title to the underlying question that this poem seems to pose, which is first introduced in the fourth line: is it hiding from its own demise? Referring to nature in general, I suppose the answer to that question is actually pretty obvious: the grass and the leaves on trees turn brown and go dormant due to natural cycles, not due to some spiritual disposition. But it’s interesting to toy around with these eccentric ideas in poetry, and that’s one of the main reasons why I wrote this poem.