We were down to a handful the other week in our little Lang/Lit A-level group that I won’t be teaching any more next year (sob), and we spent a lesson having a stab at a sonnet. Here’s my effort:
Wracking each neuron that we can invoke
to fire from our internal dictionary
words that can dissipate semantic smoke
that clouds the clarity we hope to free,
we bend together in solitary thought.
This is the school’s perennial paradox:
to own ourselves what someone else has taught;
to find the gift by graft within the box
of these drab unforgiving concrete walls.
For some those words won’t come: the lesson’s a squib;
one of a long succession of such falls.
But marking this a failure is too glib.
To fall, to learn to hit the ground, are like:
A spark examined is a lightning strike.
(inertiapreneur 