A Shakespearean sonnet, addressed to johnny M. (Because, you know, I’m supposed to be studying Surrey and Wyatt tonight…)
See God in divine glory, power revealed,
Make the heavens and earth so perfectly fair;
See him create the birds and beasts of the field,
See him populate the teeming oceans and air.
See him divide veils of darkness and bright sunlight;
See him unfold flowers of water and land,
See him spring forth, open wings and take flight,
See him wobble forth on spindly legs and stand.
See God invent humankind, curious conception:
Complicated, compassionate, cruel and confounding;
See him craft hands for work and eyes for perception—
Laughter and tears in equal measure abounding.
Amid this God a final gift and curse produces—
Brains for us, one each, meant for regular uses.
I fon’t know about the rest of you, but I found RT’s self-referential triolet and Kythereia’s “Sonnet to Johnny M.” to be amazingly good pieces of work! Thanks, guys!
Yes, that’s about the only sestina I’ve ever read, too. But I’d need to spend serious time studying the rhyming pattern before I’d dare to give it a go. Even Kipling didn’t exactly rattle them off, y’know.
From perhaps God given minds insights come
Which like His love need no further account
But demonstration and true constancy;
Knowledge of that love cannot be described
Or passed to one in explicated bread.
All can feast, but spoon feeding never works.
And those who feast don’t need a Benefactor’s works
Defined. The love’s the thing –that constancy
Of knowledge that entropy will not come
Today while some One or one’s sums account
Toward a divine or mundanely described
Whole, which for some becomes our daily bread.
To those who daily taste that love, such bread
Means so much more than how it is described.
And those with whom we share these leavened works
Need not –should not- be held to our account
Or made to hear what we imagine comes
From passing loaves He gives with constancy.
What do I gain from miming constancy?
-For that is what I do when I switch bread
For some contrived pablum which only works
To fill my mind, but not to give account
Of love, for which my neighbor surely comes
To feel and know, and not to have described.
I have been shown what cannot be described.
Should I not then show that in turn, by works
And not by words? Who would hear my account
In favor of feasting? Whose constancy
Then would be shared? From showing that love comes
The dogma you think is greater than bread.
It is the act of giving all our bread
To others, with no receipt or account
Required from which our real salvation comes.
It’s noise to me. Suppose you drove by my house and called me a dumbass in English, but I did not hear it. Was I insulted?
Not to the guy whose life was at stake.
This is exactly my point. To me, the difference between getting hit and not getting hit is huge. Your intent is meaningless. If you miss the punch, you may as well have been wiggling your ears, or doing a happy dance. It is only when the punch connects that I am affected. Conversely, if someone punches me by accident, with no intent to harm, it still feels the same. My jaw is still broken.
**hajaro **is, to use an analogy, immune to insults. He’s bulletproof, like Superman. They have no effect. Insulting him is the same as not insulting him. How can a thing be an insult and not an insult at the same time?
I don’t think parts of speech matter. You cannot insult me if I refuse to take offense, regardless of your intent. A thing is only an insult to me if it insults me.
Let’s say that you tell me the medical procedure in simple English, but I am somehow unable to grasp the concept. Have you explained anything to me? I say no. If I didn’t get it, no explanation occured.
Poor monkey gets Bushed
Coked president does murders!
An asshole - big time.
[sub](There. That should make up for the too serious sestina. I started out trying to make it snarky, but what I really wanted to say just snuck up on me. Honest.)[/sub]
You mean to tell me you wrote that sestina just for this thread? Why, I oughta pit you just for that. It took me ten years to write just one of those damned things. They always peter out by the third stanza.
After Revenant Threshold’s off-the-cuff tralala or whatever that was and Kytheria’s sonnet the bar kinda got raised, any way. -I’m so glad we’re back to haikus and limericks.
Damnation by faint praise?
OK. You have said something nasty about a pubic figure, and I could see one of his supporters consodering it to be an insult. It could also be thought of as an insult to the office of the presidency. It is a bit murkier to me whether Bush himself was insulted, if he is totally unaware of what you have said.
Let me turn your question around. Suppose I pick a name out of a hat containing all the names in America, and come up with Melissa Gardber of Pocatello Idaho. Now I write your words on a piece of paper, substituting Ms. Gardber for Mr. Bush, and put it in my pocket. Have I insulted Melissa? What if I say them out loud before putting the paper away? Then was she insulted?
Remember this exchange started because **hajario **claimed that I had insulted him, but he was not insulted. To me this is nonsense. One man’s insult might be another’s pillow talk. The only way it can be an insult is if he identifies it as an insult. It is nonsense to say “I was insulted but it didn’t insult me.”
My comment also fails your “intent” test. It was not my intention to insult him. Nevertheless, he identified it as one. Yet was not insulted. It’s rabbit hole logic.
By intentionally directing an insult (NOUN) at Ms. Gardber through speech or script, you have insulted (VERB) her. She has been insulted (VERB) by you but as she is not aware of that fact, she cannot feel insulted (ADVERB).
It may be “sticks and stones” logic but it holds up internally. You claim you had no intent to insult hajario but your remark was insulting in and of itself and was perceived that way by its subject, so you did, in fact, insult him.
He claims not to feel insulted, but he’s identified the remark as an insult. IOW, he sees the insult in being told he’s “not worth the time” to argue with, but he “doesn’t take it personally”, so he is not insulted by it.
If a conservative poster tells me “xeno, you’re nothing but a godless tax-and-spend liberal airhead” I certainly perceive an insult there, but understanding that this is a rhetorical label substituting for an argument, I can accept and even defend the truth value of “tax and spend liberal” while laughing off the rest of the remark as irrelevant noise. I can refuse to be insulted. Worked in kindergarten and still works on bigger playgrounds.
Thanks, guys!
