"I've lived too long for faith that life is fair..."

First of my 100 Things (100 Poems) blog posts!

"A sonnet might look dinky, but it's somehow big enough to accommodate
love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if
you shoved hard enough."

Or so says Anne Fadiman. And I agree.

I think sonnets are amazing creations: a very strict, very small form, but within it you can say literally anything you like. Anything at all. It's like the difference between bouncing about gleefully on the dance floor and executing a perfect fiery tango without a single misstep, a combination of freedom and structure that can be so much more than the sum of its parts. Or like those medieval miniatures, where you have a very small space in which to work, but within that space you can draw monsters or birds or leaves or tessellated patterns or tiny people, or whatever you like.

At any rate, it's a sadly under-used form these days, perhaps because it takes so much work to craft a good one (it's a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, where you have to keep shifting the little pieces around until they fit just right), so I was thrilled when someone wrote a beautiful one for deeply_horrible's "Bring Back the Bastard" fest this year. It's hard to believe that so much angst and so much history can be packed into so few lines. This is not a happy sonnet, or a love sonnet. This is a bitter and angry sonnet, in which Severus has some choice words for Dumbledore. Hope you like it as much as I did.

Title: From the Beehive
Author: primeideal

I've lived too long for faith that life is fair...