Please do so. I think you: Please do so. I think you could make a grocery list sound like a poetic experience. I would say this to only a handful of poets, and you are one of them.
In my opinion, do not change: In my opinion, do not change anything, not a single detail.
I say this because a poem like this has a major, and overriding, spiritual purpose that makes any concern as to form and format a secondary concern at best. The last two lines are an integral part of the poem. You can write other sonnets on almost any other subject; but since this poem was given to you in the form in which you have posted it---do not alter, or tinker with, its integral parts.
To keep the final couplet?: I began this poem as a short story, but it wanted to be a poem so I set it to verse instead. Originally it was the ababcdcdefefgg... English Sonnet, a method I like to employ sometimes, but decided to add an hh rhyme at the end. Not sure whether to keep the last couplet or drop it for the English Sonnet.
I have, in previous comments,: I have, in previous comments, been a little verbose---because your poems and prose are so excellent that I just can't keep my mouth shut.
This poem, however, is so excellent that the only word I can think of to describe it is WOW!
I will leave it at that. Nothing I could say further would be worthy in the face of this magnicient poem.
I'm thinking of sharing My: I'm thinking of sharing My Life's First Breath, The Dawn and She Dances, Possibly my Bukowski Triad if I feel lead to share any more. Let me know what you think!
Starward,
Thank you once: Starward,
Thank you once again for your faithful encouragements. I shared some of my poetry with a childhood friend yesterday and she talked me in to going to an open mic night with her Thursday. I've never shared out loud with anyone but close friends and internet compatriots. Wish me luck! This will be a new experience for me so I'll have to come up with a queue of poems to share.
This poem is like a double: This poem is like a double helix---containing one strand of poignant, sorrowful emotion, and one strand of tremendous verbal beauty. While---I presume---the articulation of these feelings must have been difficult, the adroit dance of your words on the screen, and the delicacy of your rhymes, have created a poem of fabulous beauty. The more of your work that I read, the more and further impressed I become.
This reminds me of an: This reminds me of an experiece I had in sixth grade. Two years before, I had "discovered" that my beloved Frankenstein films that were broadcast from time to time on Shock Theater on Saturday afternoons (the old B/W Universal Studios productions) were not just improvised by the actors, but had been based upon an idea in a novel by Mary Shelley (who was not quite nineteen years old when she thought of it, and was twenty-one when it was published). Her example made me want to be a writer. So, in that sixth grade class, we were assigned to write a short story, and I wrote about a rather formidable creature from mythology, but I dumbed the monster down so that it was friendly. The paper was returned by my teacher, with a remark scrawled across it in red pencil, "This is poor taste." Flash forward to January 2001: my first internet publication happened in London, England, when a poem of mine was accepted by a very strict board of directors who were scholars of the so-called Jack the Ripper murders. My poem attempted to explain the five anomalies of the fifth and final murder. Any theory can explain one, some theories successfully explain two, but none explain all five. Mine did; it is still on that site, as well as on PostPoems, and my theory has never been overturned. (It was once plagiarized by a writer who thought it had been fully proven, but I had to advise her that it was still "just a theory" lacking objective evidence; just a thought exercise without forensic authentication. She did take steps to cite it properly in a footnote, rather than just quote it.) I never had a chance to show that to my sixth grade teacher, who had probably croaked by that time, but I hope she knows it now . . . wherever she happens to be.
I hope I am not stretching credibility too far by comparing, broadly not specifically, my experience to yours. I suspect it happens to many, many children. When my stepson was in middle school, he was assigned to write a paper on Adolf Hitler, using library materials not a home encyclopedia. I drove him to our area's local university, made him look up several texts, and watched him as he wrote his paper there. (He did have quite an eye for the collegiate beauties who were moving about the room, and I had to repeatedly remind him to keep his eyes on his paper.) I proofread the paper and made sure his punctuation was correct. He was the only student in his class to use a university library, which gave him some status that week. However the paper was returned with an A minus, although no other marks or comments had been put upon it. I knew it was an A plus paper because I had supervised it. He was crushed by the "minus." The next day, I called the Principal from my office, advised him of the situation, and demanded that he find out why the paper did not achieve A+. He told me that the teacher had refused to comment further. I then asked the principal if the teacher would meet with me, in the principal's office, for an in-depth discussion of the history of the Third Reich---and I told the principal that I had probably forgotten more about Hitler than that teacher had ever learned. The teacher flatly refused to meet with me, he flatly refused to change the grade, and the principal refused to compel the grade change. This so disgusted my stepson that he began to give up entirely, and as soon as he turned sixteen, he dropped out. Good teachers are educators; mediocre teachers are mis-educators; and bad teachers, like my son's history teacher, are ignorizers.
We are broken in this life. : We are broken in this life. But Jesus was broken on the cross, broken to death, that in His resurrected wholeness, we will receive the wholeness with which we will live with and through Him in Heaven, unto the ages of ages. He died our deaths so that we could live His life---with Him and through Him, in the place He has prepared for us. I thank you, and pray God's blessing envelop you, for another great poem of spiritual testimony.
I am astounded with amazement: I am astounded with amazement at how this essay dovetails into your poem, and into the Romanov material, and into my Orthodox Faith in general. The gut-wrenching agony of experiencing this, and then writing about it, will be rewarded with joy in God's timing. I am even more convinced that you are writing out of a spiritual vocation---you are ministering to readers you do not know, and likely will never meet except in cyberspace, and I firmly believe you will be blessed for your effort; bread cast on the waters, as Solomon once said.
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