Voiced explorer, sent shivers down the spine
Of the dogged storm’s backlash, as, whole sky,
Inkling, struck, with “a-roar-air’s” sigh-lent whine,
Dye-fuse, that would eek out passions, to be
Felt, tipped ’pon anchored clouds, crestfallen, when
Encroached by twilight that twinkles less, de-
Liberate, chained in pitch, but lit by flares en-
Trenched in sky’s tinted tides “bore-realistic“:
Very simile-chewed as his teeth gnashed,
Over-hued, by sanguine streams, more mystic
In his mind’s eye’s woollen canvas, as flashed,
Congealed in crimson bloody-mindedness:
Ensconced in light, snow’s swept o’er mind’s deadness!
This sonnet came to me as an exercise in enjambment. Searching for a subject ambiguous enough to bring comical shifts in viewpoint, howling struck me as something of the wind or dog or man, just as a storm's backlash could be taken anthropomorphically as having spine, or could even be called dogged, thus taking confusion back and forth. The acrostic refers to the explorer avoiding the felt voice of the velvet snow as he trudges on malnourished, and the void hearing his cry as the northern lights touch upon a bleak situation. The title 'Cloth-eared' refers to the explorer being so taken up with the visceral blasts of temporal suffering in the crunchy cloth beneath his feet that he fails to look up and treasure heaven's empathy. Like the fencing poet in my last poem, this one ends a little morbidly, but we'll lighten up with a zebra poem next to follow on from huskies.
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