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Using form: John Gallas, ‘travellin feet: a Camaguey sonnet”
Im walkin in my feet to Camaguey.
The sun comes up. Im cracklin like a chicken …
Takin time …
. Now somethins comin, kickin
clouds of yeller grit behind me – Hey!
Stop! … It dont. Who cares? It whirls away.
I seen inside the flyin cotton curtain –
Business sat with Care …
. My toes are hurtin …
Whoa, I got to walk another day.
How quick they drive to worry … What I got
the other end improves with evry ache,
an every dusty extra hour I take.
Im good n weary. An Im good n hot.
Whyever hurry? … Happiness will keep …
an sorrow passes – Sleep my baby, sleep.
*****
John Gallas writes: “The Coalville Divan – 100 sonnets – included this one. The 100 are based on Old Persian Proverbs (an ancient 1920 book I found in a junk shop). A heady experience, like being addicted to Rum or something, to enter a period of writing highly formal, all-the-same-form poems. I loved it, and it built on itself as I went along, but I needed something different after the 200 tankas of ‘Billy Nibs’ (Carcanet 2024) and had withdrawal symptoms (wanting to make the tankas rhyme!).
“The proverb for this one was ‘To walk and sit is better than to run and burst’. I set it in Cuba because I’d just been there for a month. I had 2 rhyming dictionaries, 2 thesauruses, atlases, and Wikipedia while I worked on these, each one set in a different country. The challenge, I guess, is to sound accomplished/natural whilst obeying all the rhyme/metrical rules very exactly.”
John Edward Gallas FEA was born in Wellington in New Zealand and is of Austrian descent. He attended the University of Otago in his native New Zealand, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford to study Medieval English Literature and Old Icelandic and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool and various other locations in England as a bottlewasher, archaeologist and teacher.
John Gallas’ works are listed at https://www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk/
Photo: “Tired Man Walking” by RobertoCobianchi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
