If you would like to see Love beating me,
How I’m attacked, how he’s my conqueror,
How he can burn, and freeze my heart yet more,
How from my shame he takes his majesty:
If you would see a youth, bright heretofore,
Who vainly seeks his source of misery,
Come and read me: view my sad agony
Which both my Goddess and my God ignore.
You’ll learn that love lacks ratiocination
A sweet abuse, a fair incarceration,
A vain hope blown by breezes towards disaster
And you will learn that man himself betrays
When, blind and ever erring in his ways,
He must accept a Child for his master.
Philip Styrt lives in Davenport, Iowa, USA with his wife, toddler, and toothless dog. His poetry uses traditional forms to express contemporary ideas and emotions, and has been published in the Eastern Iowa Review, Writers Resist, and Quercus, among others. In his spare time, he blogs about sonnets at 140syllables.blogspot.com and is an assistant professor of English at St. Ambrose University specializing in Renaissance poetry and drama.