"A sonnet is a moment's monument". Though I count 15 lines--my favorite, "percussive clouds". Their movement occupies exactly half of the poem, with a nice closing turn enacted by lines 14-15. I'm still thinking about the effect you get in the second line with those two dashes below the line and I can't cite precedent usage. Nothing underlined, as it were.
Barry
On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:05:20 -0700, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>more than one country
>_open to death_ yet
>not all dark dreams
>manifest how
>turn to language beset
>by angels so dark light
>a saving grace full
>moon in time
>percussive clouds
>slowly dance
>across the sky above
>the packed square
>tentative balance of forces
>fireworks displace bombs
>in that moment hanging there
>
>
>Douglas Barbour
>[log in to unmask]
>
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
>Latest books:
>Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>Wednesdays'
>http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
>Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
>
> Walter Benjamin
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