Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SONNET: 46, by HAYDEN CARRUTH


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SONNET: 46, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: To rebel. So I have saved my life, not once


To rebel. So I have saved my life, not once
but over and over these sixty years, and I'm
grateful to myself, of course. Epidemic time,
the bomb, gives any health a special importance.
Yet can it mean survival? This puppet dance
of outraged dignity, so theatrical, this mime
of Being? How futile. It asks more than rhyme,
not a changed self only, but changed existence,
and there is none. I don't know why rebellion
doesn't suffice. Maybe after all some given
in humanness, the "natural" dream of heaven,
drives us to hope, the one chance in a million.
But I give up. Comrades, you can have my books.
No longer will I throw poems at the fat archdukes.


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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