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September 2021
Sarah White
sarahwhitepages@gmail.com
Bio Note: I live in New York City and divide my time between painting and writing…Lately, it’s memoir and many many sonnets. Two new ones are attached, and there are more in a new chapbook called Fledgeling (Word Tech Communications), available from big bad Amazon.

Upside down sonnet beginning with lines by W. H. Auden

“If equal affection cannot be,
let the most loving one be me.”
Suppose the person you adore

Looks at you with an indifferent eye.
Be grateful. Do not fret or cry.
Lucky is the person who loves more.

Dread the verb “to hurt,”
and the tricky way it works 
or doesn’t work. “You hurt me.”
“I’m hurting.” Which is worse?

A lover swears he’ll stay, though the way
you carry on may be humorless and grim. 
You should affirm the same, but can’t bring
yourself to say you’ll stay with him.
                        

The Sonnet of Jocelyn Bell Burnell

In no home economics class will a pulsar
be discovered.  Never has one been seen
clad in a diaper. No pulsar treat has been
displayed or sold at any Bake Sale run 

by the peacenik PTA for the benefit 
of our town’s recently arrived and still  
under-served families. Nor, in Stockholm, 
have we ever praised the person or the name

of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the discoverer
of pulsars. We must celebrate right here, 
right now the Mother of that throbbing body.

 Oh, annunciating angel—First human being
of any gender to have seen and known how strong, 
how bright, how strange, how far the pulsars are.
                        
©2021 Sarah White
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL
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