How Do I Put a Plague into Fourteen Lines

KATHRYN JONES

May 5, 2020

After Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines”

I long to write a sonnet like Shakespeare,

Fourteen lines about beauty, truth, and love;

Yet we live in the midst of numbing fear,

I dare not touch a thing without a glove.

How do I put a plague in fourteen lines 

Of ten syllables and a rhyming scheme?

Iambic pentameter’s beat confines

When my heart wants to pour out in a stream.

I sit by the window and cannot leave

So I journey to you, friend, in my mind,

This prolonged apartness does make me grieve

As does the loss of so much humankind.

      Flatten the curve and help the weak revive,

      Hold close beauty, truth, and love to survive.

KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and  a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.