Aspiring
A deeply personal sonnet.
Thank you for your patience during my slight drought in uploading.
I also wanted to personally thank those of you who have subscribed since my last post - over 20 people, which is quite a flattering shock. I’d like to offer you a warm welcome to the community; your presence is noted and appreciated.
I haven’t finished anything new this week, but it feels like a good opportunity to drag something out of ‘the archive’.
I wrote this sonnet in October 2023. I submitted it anonymously to competitions, but didn’t get much feedback. I think it is because this poem is heavily informed by its context, and in a blind judgement that is fairly worthless.
The primary context is that, in my late teens and early twenties, I was at university training to become a speech therapist. It was a career I was utterly devoted to. I felt called to it as a vocation. However, a combination of failures - on my own part as well as on the part of others - led me elsewhere.
I am much happier and more fulfilled in my current life than I ever would have been as a speech therapist, and it is only with a few years’ reflection I can see this was an enormous blessing in disguise.
However, I still occasionally mourn the life I would have had in this field, as is human nature.
~
‘Aspiring’
The taxi driver asks my profession,
and I segment my dream in swallowed breath -
hospitals, schools - sounding the impression
I possess queenship o’er the shibboleth;
and thus, anointed, armed with phones and lungs,
globe in left hand, bulletin in the right,
I fish out prophets who speak unheard tongues,
and cast aside the dawnless silenced night.
In truth, I am a child within a cloak,
prejudiced beggar of powers-that-be,
grasping phrases in my fingers like smoke
blown out by changing winds upon the sea:
Staring at, as Westminster Abbey sings,
the floor tiles between Lionel Logue and King.



I love this!
“grasping phrases in my fingers like smoke” That is a feeling I know well. Thanks for sharing your sonnet.