In 2018, I decided to write a couple of sonnets that omit certain vowels. Looking back, this exercise was deeply pretentious, and the effect is only really visual. I recall reading George Perec’s La Disparition, and the way in which a common vowel is missing in order to highlight the absence of something once ubiquitous, the Jewish people, in the strange recoiling trauma of the post-war period. I wish I was making a point as sophisticated, and serious, in my own Grail Sonnets.
Grail Sonnets III
Tonight – I know it – she’ll love me for a night,
one night alone. Beneath this fire moon –
shedding each fibre of its black cocoon –
she is finally set free. Her hand is grappling mine…
and each sinew, static, now bleeds electric light,
each dry bone is dripping wet in bloom.
Within the heart of her tabernacled room –
incensed – the Dark is clawing from her mind,
one night alone. We met again: a mighty weight
drags down each inch as if a chrysalis,
or as that shadow of the moon’s embrace
and (needless to say) that shell finally slipped
away, for good, seeing as she died with it
and they wonder why I wear her as a skein.
Squidditas 