Volume > Issue > Sonnet for C.B.

Sonnet for C.B.

A POEM

By Thomas Fleming | September 1986

How strange to see this landscape in the glass,

The surface — twinges frozen to a sneer —

An ancient planet’s blunt, misshapen mass,

Where tidal sandstorms and volcanoes sear

The well-worn fissures of familiar sins

And feelings now like stunned survivors creep

From silent caverns: half-suggestive grins,

The broken grimaces of too much sleep;

A cinder long ago escaped its star,

Careening weightless through unblinking space,

A fugitive in interstellar war,

Too far for an alien settlement to grace

This darkening image in the startled glass

That rings more hollow than a sounding brass.

 

© 1986 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

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