Tag Archives: sonnet

The Power of Stupid

“The Power of Stupid”

Have you seen the latest? Shocking! she says,
lifting a copy of the Daily Mail,
that collection of British fairytales
from the fifties, when darkies knew their place.
Did you see that old sod Junckers, saying
there’ll be a cost to Brexit. Excuse me!
Cheeky bastard! Over my dead body!
We’ll walk right out, we’re not bloody paying!
Oooh, Trump, I like his conviction! Classy!
just look at how he held Theresa’s hand –
that proves it – really, he’s a gentleman
– if she thinks he’s all right, then he must be.
Thus politics shrinks to banality
when dupes idolize personality.

Man In The Moon – Draft 3

The latest version of my sonnet on the moon.  In my previous version I identified rhythmic problems to do with the shift from iambic pentameter to trochaic pentameter in the second quatrain.  It meant the loss of a syllable at the end of the iambic lines in order to keep the meter fluid – a compromise I was not willing to make.  At the same time, it was conceptually clunky, failing to segue adequately between quatrains and sextet.  This one is closer, still, to where I am heading with this:

Man In The Moon

The More Modern Man In The Moon
The More Modern Man In The Moon

“When witches long ago beheld the moon
they conjured up a man hunched with a pack.
Astronomers spied ‘seas’ that would maroon
A sailor in a tranquil well of black.
Later, truer lenses picked out craters
ringed by nightbound mountains. Violent meteor
storms had tattooed deep on Luna’s face a
shadow-man – an ink-blot human creature.”
A woman, thinking, as she travels, weaves
her moonbug’s track through lunar rocks and dust –
“Technology sustains life and relieves
our need for faith or guesswork – even trust…”
The Cosmos is a mirror to each mind:
Look long upon its glass: What will YOU find?


Copyright (c) 2011, Matthew Wingett

Man In The Moon – Draft 2

Well, that didn’t take long before I rewrote it.  Here we go again:


The Man In The Moon With Pack
The Man In The Moon Envisioned By the Ancients

Man In The Moon

“When priests in ancient times beheld the moon
they conjured up a man hunched with a pack.
Astronomers spied seas that would maroon
A sailor in a tranquil well of black.
Later, truer lenses picked out craters
ringed by nightbound mountains. Meteor storms
had violently incised on Luna’s face a
shadow-man – an ink-blot human form.”
A woman, peering through her visor, shrugs
away these thoughts. With slow-mo tread through rocks
and lunar dust she mounts her waiting moonbug –
driving on toward her metal box…
…She leaves behind a footprint as a sign:
“The Universe is shaped within a mind.”


Copyright (c) Matthew Wingett 2011

“I Bought A Long Case Clock” – A Sonnet

A couple of years ago I got thinking about the grandfather clock I had picked up at an auction for not too much money.  It was a beautiful thing; built around 1820, slender and delicate, with the most gentle sound of a bell, like a ghost of time, marking out the hours.  It got me thinking about time and how it holds the universe together, and in that daydream I had the idea for this sonnet.  I hope you like it.

PS: I still don’t think I’ve got the final line right, so am working on it!


I Bought A Long Case Clock

I bought a long case clock, whose motive weight

through wheels, escapement, pendulum and gears

spins time with gravity. Now contemplate

how Time has Weight to mark our passing years;

how gravity’s a mystery whose effects

are seen in Heaven’s Movement and the Tide –

revealed by bending starlight, it directs

unseen: forever present, yet implied;

how Time’s the precondition for the chain

of causes linking future, present, past;

and how this impulse secretly sustains

our World: it was the first, it will be last.

All this my clock provokes: how this machine

the Infinite implies…

…and hands unseen


Copyright (c) 2010 Matthew Wingett in all media