A Sonnet for Sarah
Sometimes she’d lie there in the cool of night, The voices stilled at last, the cattle hushed, And, weary from a day of heat and dust, She’d close her eyes and once again the sight Of all she’d loved and left behind would quite Rebreak her heart. She’d left because she must: Her husband called the shots. She tried to trust His quiet confidence that he’d done right. And so they left, not knowing where they went. Familiar landmarks vanished one by one. But she’d have borne those griefs, laughed at those scars, Could she have borne the man she loved a son. He seemed to find some comfort in the stars; She hadn’t figured out just what they meant.
I don’t often write Italian sonnets—being limited to only two rhyme sounds for the first eight lines makes it a bit of a feat to pull off successfully. Besides, I love the neat and tidy ending of the English sonnet. That sense of resolution is missing from the Italian sonnet, which has a rhyme scheme that doesn’t allow for the final two lines to rhyme. I think, though, that that slightly jarring note works well for this poem, which I wrote about Abraham’s wife, Sarah. We, cosily distant from her by thousands of years, know how her story of long infertility ends: she does in fact have a child and becomes the matriarch of a great nation. Sarah herself, however, had to live in sadness and uncertainty for years, ignorant of how her story would end, and even if Abraham shared with her the promises that God eventually made him, she must have found them hard to believe, flying as they did in the face of all the evidence. And so this sonnet is for her, for me, for anyone who lies awake at night with the darkness heavy around them, struggling to see or to make sense of the starful of promises overhead.