to wish Hanley Castle W.I. a happy 70th
birthday in the form of a sonnet.
There is no way to make the sonnet
form
Arrange itself around a birthday
song;
More weighty subject matter is the
norm,
As life or death or love or time
or wrong;
The sonnet does not treat of woolly
hats,
Or knitted dogs or jams or flowers
or craft;
Is not the vehicle for chits and
chats,
For minutes, programmes or an
overdraft.
This lyric poem has parameters
Inimical to sandwiches of paste,
The iambs of its strict
pentameters
Should not be trivialised or so
disgraced;
Old Petrarch and good Shakespeare
blench and sigh -
Prostituted by the W.I..
(March,
1991)
