One Poem - A Sonnet by Clare Bonetree

 

Inheritances 

 

Here he comes - the horned god, rushing in,  

eyes flashing, on his lips a demonic smile, 

exploding through the door of liberation 

though with nothing real to say; his flash and style - 

although seductive - soon fizzle out like fire 

works in the rain - a fleeting show of light 

that leaves no trace but on the eye. 

briefly blinding; an impermanent blight. 

A desperate inheritor of chaos, 

reared in violence he was never taught to see,  

he cannot smell the sulphurous fumes he trails,  

he cannot know his bestiality. 

The heirs to Free Born John, though, stand their ground, 

make their proclamations without a sound.

 

 

 

Clare Bonetree is a well-travelled poet now living in the Marches - the borderlands between England and Wales, where myth and history hang about the hills and drift through the river valleys. In the 1990s (as Clare Cochrane) she co-hosted and performed at the monthly Outloud poetry events at Club 64 in Hong Kong, named in remembrance of the events in Tiananmen Square on 4th June 1989, and was published in the first Outloud anthology of Hong Kong poets (2002). After a two-decade absence from poetry she is writing again, and has recently published in the online journals Impossible Archetype, After... and Réapparition Journal.