Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Volkman
Karen Volkman
Poet Karen Volkman was the recipient of the James Laughlin Award and the Iowa Poetry Prize...
More >
FURTHER READING
Related Poems
To be the thing
by Dorothea Lasky
Other Sonnets
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
by Ted Berrigan
Acquainted with the Night
by Robert Frost
American Sonnet (10)
by Wanda Coleman
American Sonnet (35)
by Wanda Coleman
Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
by Eavan Boland
Autumn
by Richard Garcia
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
by William Wordsworth
Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
by John Donne
Discourse
by Forrest Hamer
Half-Hearted Sonnet
by Kim Addonizio
History
by Robert Lowell
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Mother Night
by James Weldon Johnson
My Letters! all dead paper... (Sonnet 28)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)
by William Shakespeare
Oil & Steel
by Henri Cole
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18)
by William Shakespeare
Shawl
by Albert Goldbarth
Silence
by Thomas Hood
Sonnet
by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Sonnet 1
by Gwendolyn Bennett
Sonnet 100
by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville
Sonnet 101 [Ways apt and new to sing of love I'd find]
by Petrarch
Sonnet 131 [I'd sing of Love in such a novel fashion]
by Petrarch
Sonnet 6
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnet 8 [Set me where as the sun doth parch the green]
by Petrarch
Sonnet V
by Mahmoud Darwish
Sonnet—Silence
by Edgar Allan Poe
Testing Gardening
by Marie Ponsot
Today We Make the Poet's Words Our Own
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Untitled [You did say, need me less and I'll want you more]
by Marilyn Hacker
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
by John Milton
Without Discussion
by Samuel Amadon
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
Sonnet [Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,]  
by Karen Volkman
Get Flash Player

Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,
the earth, blue egg, in its seeping shell
dispensing damage like a hollow hell
inchling weeping for a minor sea

ticking its tidelets, x and y and z.
The blue beneficence we call and spell
and call blue heaven, the whiteblue well
of constant water, deepening a thee,

a thou and who, touching every what—
and in the or, a shudder in the cut—
and that you are, blue mirror, only stare

bluest blankness, whether in the where,
sheen that bleeds blue beauty we are taught
drowns and booms and vowels.  I will not.



Share Digg StumbleUpon Facebook E-mail to Friend


Audio Clip
May 13, 2008
The Academy Offices
From the Academy Audio Archive



From Nomina by Karen Volkman. Copyright © 2008 by Karen Volkman. Reprinted by permission of B.O.A. Editions. All rights reserved.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2012 by Academy of American Poets.