Photo by Joe Warner
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright and activist. She lives in London and teaches and mentors for The Poetry School. Her most recent play, The Noises was nominated for a Standing Ovation Award. Two of her sonnet sequences A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller (2017) and Veritas: Poems After Artemisia (2020) are published by Hercules Editions. Her poetry collections from Nine Arches Press are All My Mad Mothers, shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize, Dad, Remember You are Dead (2019).
Her most recent project is One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets (2021), from which Sonnet X is taken:
Sonnet X 1st April 2020
‘This is going to be a very painful, very, very painful two weeks.’ Donald Trump
‘The outbreak is the biggest global challenge since World War Two‘ BBC News
The days are falling down and falling out,
they have no discipline. They are at ease,
on furlough, otherwise engaged, they flout
the rules, they don’t respect our boundaries.
The hours are down the pub, far gone, they shock
and riot at the remnants of our lives,
they mock our forward plans, they kick the clock,
they scorn our coffee dates, our cocktail nights,
our must not miss, our meetings with the boss.
We rise at noon, we eat at three, as time
runs on unchecked, unquantified and lost,
we sweep our calendars only to find
parades of dust; our baffled futures track
the voided pages of our almanacs.
You can order One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets direct from the publisher and from Amazon.
If you would like to support a fantastic poetry event to support those suffering in Ukraine click here.
Twitter @jsaphra
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