***
I set aside my white smocked cotton blouse,
my pants with the elastic belly panel.
The only music in the empty house
strains from a distant country western channel.
My breasts are weeping. I’ve been given leave –
a week in which to heal and convalesce.
I peel away the ceiling stars; unweave
the year I’d entered on your christening dress.
I rearrange my premises – perverse
assumptions! – gather unripe figs; throw out
the bloodied bedclothes; scour the universe
in search of you. And God. And go about
my business as my crooked smile displays
the artful look of ordinary days.
***
Catherine Chandler (1950 ― ), an American-born Canadian poet, teacher and translator and graduate of McGill University, is winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award 2010, and nominee for six Pushcart Prizes, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2013 Poets’ Prize. She is the author of five books of poetry, the latest, Glad and Sorry Seasons, forthcoming from Biblioasis Press. Her poems, translations, essays, reviews, interviews and podcasts have been widely published in print and online books, journals and anthologies, including The Alabama Literary Review, Orbis, Quadrant, Iambs and Trochees, Measure, Able Muse, Raintown Review, Sonnetto Poesia and The Centrifugal Eye. Catherine writes sonnets because it is her way of trying, as she writes in her sonnet “Sonnet Love”, “to modulate unmanageable grief”. Her website, The Wonderful Boat, welcomes visitors at cathychandler.blogspot.com
“Coming to Terms” by Catherine Chandler, is the winner of the 2010 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. It now appears in The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire.
Some 300 sonnets and ghazals in English, French, Spanish,German and Farsi―publish at Friesen Press. Canada 2014. ISBN: Hard-cover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 eBook: 978-1-4602-1702-3. Available at Amazon & Barnes & Noble
We urge readers of these sonnets in Poetry Life & Times from The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes = Le Phénix renaissant deses cendes to visit the site http://vallance22.hpage.com/
Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.