"Our Unexpected Reciprocity," A New American Sonnet to an Unnamed Friend
Our Unexpected Reciprocity
A New American Sonnet
I miss your presence and your messages,
your pictures and your precious packages
of kindness generously overflowing
to find new ways of learning and of knowing
that strangely stimulate my complicated heart
to set aside the old and find new ways to start,
requiring me to write new worlds of poetry
that practice once again my harmless co-quet-ry
to coax from you through caring correspondence
a sharing and relaxing reassurance,
exchanging with each other words of inspiration
for better focused literary concentration.
Mys-te-ri-ous the many ways of pro-duc-ti-vi-ty,
but stranger still our unexpected re-ci-pro-ci-ty.
Max Havlick, September 1-4, 2015
Writers Workshop Note: Stimulus and Response
As immediate stimulus, I wrote this American sonnet to an unnamed Internet friend different from me in a hundred ways, but who even in a her recent extended sabbatical from activity, eventually still caused me, inspired me, to write to her in the poetic form I was blessed to invent a few years ago and still find a fascinating challenge.
As I say in the work itself, such delightful, creative inspiration of one person to a virtually unknown other can hardly be explained in everyday language, if at all.
Hopefully, however, the idea behind this sonnet has some general interest, because it seems the world is full of short, unexpected fascinations followed by a sense of longing and desire that can, when effectively channeled, produce useful results of interest and value to a wider audience.
If you can relate to this, please leave a comment.