young man’s fancy - a sonnet

 

Don Juan in the Sonnet

Just to be a poet of love, Ovid
of this new Age, but then-experience.
Heart racing, straining, as I jump, climb, swim,
fall my way away from fathers, husbands,
brothers with bared steel and death in their eyes?
All the time pining for my own Roxanne
only to find naïve heart and nether
organ beguiled by today’s Jezebel?

I tell you, I saw Bathsheba bathing,
but when I learned of her husband, ran to
stand beside him at Troy, at Jericho,
at Babylon, and Antietam-My blood
ran red with his, yet he has that comfort
left at home, love’s faith promise . . . What have I?

             David M Pitchford