Sonnet 673

I burned a poem I’d written in the hearth

And watched the smoke rise slowly up to heaven

To find, perhaps, in ash a pardoned heart

Now freed at last from all its dark obsession.

That paper, curled, tormented, black and grey

Seemed so to mirror sentiments in kind,

The sweetest hopes that souls might ever pray

Now but a charred and blackened crust of rind.

A puff of errant wind came down the flue

And smote apart that cinder lying there,

As though God bade me never to renew

Those tainted vows that fostered dire despair.

That gust that razed the past gave embers light—

And to my blackened soul, a spark of life.

Loubert S Suddaby poems