The Mona Van Duyn Poem that I am adding today is from The Making of a Sonnet, edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland. I will be adding in here a link to an online page of Van Duyn poety from Modern American Poets the Amazon Link to her collected poems and a Wikipedia page about the poet.
A selection of Mona van Duyn’s online poetry is available here . There follows a brief excerpt from Letter from a Father ,
Bet you’d never guess
the sparrow I’ve got here, House Sparrow you wrote,
but I have Fox Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows,
Pine Woods and Tree and Chipping and White Throat
and White Crowned Sparrows. I have six Cardinals,
three pairs, they come at early morning and night,
the males at the feeder and on the ground the females.
from Modern American Poetry , Mona Van Duyn online Poems.
Double Sonnet for Minimalists.
The spiral shell
apes creamhorns of smog,
Dalmatian, quenelle
or frosted hedgehog,
yet its obsessed
by a single thought
that its inner guest
is strictly taught.
When the self that grew
to follow is rule
is gone, and it’s through,
vacant, fanciful,
its thought will find
Fibonacci’s mind.
That fragile slug,
bloodless, unborn,
till it knows the hug
of love’s tutoring form,
whose life, upstart
in deep, is to learn
to follow the art
of turn and return,
when dead, for the dense
casts up no clue
to the infinite sequence
it submitted to.
May its bright ghost reach
the right heart’s beach.
by Mona Van Duyn
from The Making of a Sonnet, edited by Eavan Boland and Edward Hirsch. Norton.
Chris Murray 