The summer’s heat passed, in late autumn’s glow

Darkly sway leafless canopy of trees.

The land is barren; nothing else will grow,

Dormant are nature’s sweet abilities.

The meadow is bleak, mist lies on the ground,

High upon there white cape covers the hills,

Breeze chases dry leaves around and around,

The air’s pregnant with lurking winter chills.

In my heart long past spring’s memories cry,

But in ossified veins longings are meek,

Arousing old desires in vain I try,

The spirit is live, but the flesh is weak.

My youth is gone and with it the heartache,

Over dead passions I sit in calm wake.

© P. J. Oszmann (2004)

© Illustration: Photo composite created in Photoshop (2005)

Footnotes: This piece is an ”accidental” sonnet. The idea of the title and what is now the finishing line came to me and I jotted them down. I had only the vaguest notion what I intended to express in the poem, but no preconceived ideas about writing a sonnet. The ten syllabi in that solitary line sat the meter for the rest, but nothing further happened until several weeks later I wrote the first two stanzas, with the intent of writing an allegorical poem, but not quite knowing which way it should go. A few days later I wrote the third stanza and abandoned it yet again, thinking that it was hopeless. When I next looked at it a couple of days later, it looked that I had three stanzas and one “floating “line, all totally out of joint. I then suddenly realised that it only needed a slight revision of the third stanza and one more line to complete it as a sonnet. “La voilá” – as they say in French, or “the rest is history” – as they say in English. (Don’t ask me how they would say it in Hungarian; it would probably be the equivalent of a four-letter word – only much longer!... I know… it did come to me when I though I could not finish the poem...)