Jackpine Sonnets

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From Jackpine Sonnets, published by Steel Rail Educational Publishing in 1977. The jackpine sonnet is a genre created by the Canadian poet Milton Acorn (1923–1986). Acorn was the recipient of a Governor General’s Award and the first Peoples' Poet Award. He was born in Prince Edward Island and wrote eighteen books of poetry, six of which were published posthumously. The two sonnets here appear on the occasion of the first Geist Jackpine Sonnet Contest.

U.F.O. 

Shall I compare you to a u.f.o? 
You’re just as mysterious. 
Shall I compare a u.f.o. to you? 
Those vehicles exist. I saw one sure 
As the fact you’re gone and I’ve tried 
Hate as a cure for love 
In covens of thorn with roses, where I hide 
From complicated beauty more like yours; 
Rating my half-cut death as fate 
When I’d promised fate more future than that.

It shone like the sun: but only for an eye 
Which sought it out; otherwise just a strange 
Moveable star it was. Nor did it glare 
Or illuminate the scene around it. 
Until my look fitted onto that stare 
Winter had combined all other seasons. 
On other planets other things change 
And I’d loved you too long, at most for half a reason

Love in the Nineteen Fifties

On that beach with light shifting breaths 
Of breezes touching us like gentle 
Curious, strong, all-surrounding presences 
Watching, and you watching . . . I stuck a gull’s 
Tailfeather askew ten white degrees
Out of perpendicular to match
The slant of the nearest sail on that diseased 
Warm doubt of a day.
                Grief hope and fury
Were all there, speaking tentatively 
In a jury just met.
                Wants too early 
Stirring your blood, vision, nerves and mine 
Over that tilting token in the sand;
Having made a sign, still wanted a sign
While low lightblue waves just tapped the island.

IN THAT TIME THE WISE
RARELY SWORE TO ANYTHING
SINCE MOST WORDS WERE LIES