Second Saturday’s Sonnet

Will and testament

By Morris Dean
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Time was, we carved the cello’s Venus mound,
Composed the music for the melody,
And aged the ocher wood to free the sound
To sing the cello’s heart from memory.

And now we with our son and daughter breathe
The honey’s forest fragrance tongued by bees
From flowers’ lips, and to our kids bequeath
The living golden sweet of our heartsease.

Let’s share the sun-ripe orange of our mind,
And show our kids to bite as we have done
The dulcet fruit within its gilded rind,
To taste the world our friendly knowing won.

Music, when soft our honeyed voices die,
Will vibrate in their liquid memory’s eye.

[Adapted with small modifications from a sonnet written in 1986 and published here on July 8, 2006. In the original version, the children were all boys, because the male friend the poem addressed had two sons, and, to get around the metrical awkwardness of including a daughter, I took the shortcut of pretending that my children were both boys also. In today's version, the poem addresses my wife – and our first-born cellist son and our nature-loving daughter.]

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean