SUNDAY SONNET BY CONNIE ALLFREY

 As I reflected on what to post next in the Vigour and Skills journal, I began to think about inspiration. Inspiration is something that comes in many different guises to us all. So this week, I’m asking: what inspires us, what pushes us in the different creative directions we take, and what holds us back?

 Personally, people and their stories play a huge, if not central part of what makes me tick. I’m fascinated by our need to be understood and the different ways people do that.

 On that note, over recent years, I have been lucky enough to be a spectator to an old friend on her exciting journey. And so for this week’s journal, I’m honoured to share with you this friend’s bright young talent in the form of a Sunday Sonnet.

 Enjoy!

Beatrice.

The Revolution

‘She had felt that because nothing lasts

nothing really mattered’.

I wrote that on this envelope’s back I’m staring at,

but when and why and who she is

is hazy.

I don’t feel that.

I feel I’ve had enough though

of this bind.

I’m over being told –

my body’s knowing seems to count for nothing,

my mind’s confused, a huddled partridge

given reign.

I’m over this

and underwhelmed by Man,

brittle, vague and clawing for the helm,

sometimes wicked.

I’m over ticking off things,

ready to investigate the gap.

So I’ve decided to leave

and hold my life in hand,

take charge of my own inner space,

begin a one man band.

Who’s in?

We’re forming fairly near the edge

to sounds of breaking Sea –

the mind decays seeking security,

so why not be an eagle

soaring eastward?

We need a revolution

not the old revolting kind,

where one triangle upturns another,

but a world on a level

with near points of power,

nearer than heartbeats,

easy as leopard light.

It’s not a time to be timid,

to outsource thoughts and power,

but to remember our connection

and find the key in how we see it –

imagine what we’d lift

if we could breathe in unison.

Let’s move as humankind

in maskless awe,

feeling the fabric of existence in our touch,

knowing ourselves as Heaven’s door.

Our Time walks on,

and must persist

until we reach the Golden Age that’s promised.

The old age way is burning up,

depleted,

but look and see the Phoenix

brightly rising.

It’s you and I who need to dust down falsity,

inhabit ourselves fully.

What Truth is there inside of you – thirsting?

Forget the rest.

Thank god a poem doesn’t need to answer,

but only open up like peonies,

whose waxen petals droop,

fat and spent,

returning.

’Yes no thing lasts’ they seem to say,

‘but yes the nothing just behind

is real and matters’.

I turn the envelope afresh,

investigating further.

It seems she knew it all along.