sonnet love affair

By Sofia Ventura

After Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 & Edna St. Vincent Millay

I first fell out of love in seventh grade:

130, read out loud, line by line.

This poet could demean and bitch and whine

then call it love. At twelve years old I made

a raging promise (not yet disobeyed):

that I would never use a verse of mine

to hurt a girl like that; to heartlessly define

what beauty is, then in two lines persuade

that girl you loved her, who could not be so.

How could she love the face defaced by you,

you man, who said: you are not lovely, but

not all can be a goddess? This man stole

all women’s beauty when we thought him true.

A love as false as that could only fall. 

Millay convinced me poetry still shone

when I was sad, fourteen, and read too much.

Her laugh was gentle. Was it woman’s touch?

Sarcastic love, intense, wind-wild, and prone

to leave me smiling. That girl could dethrone

all men who thought that love was such

as men had painted – wielding shame, to clutch

a woman to your chest and yours alone.

130 seems, to me at eighteen, blind.

How foolish, thinking any woman less

than goddess! How I pity you your lies

and with them, any men to them inclined.

Poetry like that, I must confess,

proves you’ve forgot all girls have sunlight eyes.

Sofia Ventura is a violinist, writer, and student. She studies music education and English literature at the University of Miami. By using traditional forms of poetry to share nontraditional messages, she hopes to reimagine and revitalize form poetry and its possibilities.