She flashed me the ugly hard, I did not know her

sonnet no. xlviii, 2

This crown of sonnets

In May I wrote a strange sonnet, which took as its catalyst an interaction between a white man and a Filipina-American responding to the Baybayin script tattooed on the white man’s arm. This poem began a crown sequence: in May and June I worked through the first eight of those sonnets, and published five for this series.

I worked a little in the dark as to what the point of the crown was. I took as part of my fill the stories told in Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology about the sacrificial rites and the immolation of the deities in ancient cultures: this helped underpin a story ( or at least a layout ) for the sequence.

I’m re-publishing the sequence again to get the first poems a little caught up to the themes that revealed themselves later. The poem below is a revision, mostly at the volta, of the first poem in the sequence.

For the second sonnet, click the link below:

A tomb was growing deep in catalogue. My mind —

In the next weeks I’ll work to bring out the entire sequence. Some of it will be a reworking of the previous drafts, others will be new. If I falter, it’s likely I took a misstep somewhere in the sequence and will have to turn back and go over the old ground again. I’m hoping you will be patient with me, if that’s the case.

Photo by Doun Rain AKA Tomas Gaspar on Unsplash