“I saw the danger, yet I passed along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.”
Patrick Kavanaugh
The Hospital
by Patrick Kavanaugh
A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins – an art lover’s woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.
This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.
Fourteen Lines 
Kavanaugh’s sonnet is so graceful, little sense of forcing the rhyme, particularly in the octet. The long wait for the final rhyme? Unusual. I’m not sure yet of its effectiveness.
As usual, enjoy finding fresh poems to experience here.
LikeLike