Today, noon traffic crowding, heat appalling,
I saw the double of someone I knew.
A face from long ago, I heard it calling
as plain as I might now be hearing you.
Thank God I’m not a king, or Canon Law
would have me married to the woman yet!
Pathetic creature! Not the one I saw.
That woman looked like one I would forget.
I mustn’t be unkind! Resentment speaks.
So many years to hold a useless grudge!
Life’s like a faulty sink from which love leaks.
Would you believe I stopped and couldn’t budge?
-Forgive my grief, then, when I turn aside.
-I have at heart what I had thought had died.
E.M. Schorb (1935 ― ) began writing poetry when he was a teen and has never stopped. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the North Carolina Arts Council, along with grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Carnegie Fund, among others. His poetry has appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Chicago Review, The Deronda Review, The Formalist, Measure, Lucid Rhythms, The Lyric, The New Formalist, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review and many other publications. His collection, Time and Fevers, was a 2007 recipient of an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing and also won the “Writer’s Digest” Award for Self-Published Books in Poetry. One collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press. Other work is listed and reviewed at: emschorb.com/
This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. 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. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA
300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. 30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.
http://vallance22.hpage.com/http://vallance22.hpage.com/
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