The 100 First Lines from The Wild Sonnets: Volume VIII

With the first book in my Wild Sonnet series, I decided I would include an index of first lines in alphabetical order. I had always admired and appreciated that feature in older anthologies and collections of classical poets, and wanted to give my readers a way to quickly glance at what they would encounter in this collection of 100 new works.

That was in 2018, and I have continued the practice in the seven volumes that followed. It occurred to me recently that it might be worth sharing the index from the most recent release, The Wild Sonnets: Volume VIII (701-800). And here it is:

INDEX OF FIRST LINES I THE WILD SONNETS: VOLUME VIII (701-800)

Allow my five and reverberate senses to ring – 756
Am I not a symposium of supposition – 753
Are we not celestial and see our orbital – 739
As monumental music collecting to its close – 704
Begin, O brittle world, once more to break – 737
Between the ancients and the end there is – 702
Between the winning and weeping – a triumph – 715
Breathe your fire and be the dragon of – 785
Carve out whatever crevice your insistence – 722
Catastrophe – the spilled ink of history – 761
Chrysalis and cage, the wet soup of my liquid – 746
Consider then there is a keeper of keys – 736
Do not you hear the daylight laughing – 799
Does it not splinter in the heart to lose – 760
Does not this teeming green grow enough – 733
Each of us in the brash and brightness of day – 763
Every river has its own and singular song – 788
Full moon tonight and I feel it deep – 780
Hear in this the prosody of particles – 741
How many bolted and unnumbered times – 713
I am a citizen in the city of rain – 742
I am all at once the howling babe at birth – 798
I am already made of memory – 765
I ask not to be believed – I am not – 793
I care not for the seven categorical – 777
I consider my thoughts as a carousel – 750
I do expect that heaven is a hospital – 796
I envy the snail her spiral shell – 711
I have seen that even the deaf can dance – 774
I have this moment decided to sit – 766
I have watched devastation in her dance – 725
I know how to build from the breakage – 762
I know now what it is to fall, to feel – 731
I will not give my sword to circumstance – 754
I will roar like the mountains in the morning – 757
I would borrow no man’s thinkings – 747
If all I have can be held in the clutch – 721
Illumine where you may and lay your shadows – 714
Intuition is a lonely algebra – 768
It does not bend its iridescent arc – 720
It is that slanting hour of day to bring – 740
Kings and corners, right angles and regalia – 752
Let me haunt this body a little longer – 781
Let me learn to live in the quiet of the storm – 744
Let me look upon the dimpled stars – 795
Let me no more scan merely on the skin – 758
Let me see again the man I will be – 730
Let me wander my days as one would stray – 724
Let me wander through the darkness of – 712
Let the ache of learning come from what is lost – 726
Let the bitter go by – the confectionary – 745
Let the boil and bedlam of my breath go by – 716
Let the scene outside these painted walls – 797
Let us begin with the grave and walk – 727
Long before the language was the listening – 787
Love thrives not in the heart but in the hands – 775
Measure me at this moment’s minimum – 718
Mercy to the mountains that cannot measure – 738
My life is minted not in great amounts – 735
My sightless soul has been these seven months – 791
Need everything hammer to some prime purpose – 779
Never knew my name before the liturgy – 707
No lonelier notes than the widening sound – 784
Now is the season of the dragonfly – 789
Now the night kneels down at the slender altar – 755
Odysseus knew that after the triumph – 723
Of all the loves Olympus could provide – 751
Once I spent the night awake and waiting – 767
One cannot strike the humming hive then bid – 771
Paring or pairing, in the cutting – 732
Place all that’s mine upon the nodding – 749
Seek not for your salvation in the pointed – 794
Shuffle and shift, the deck of all my days – 782
Since I have from the labyrinth of my language – 800
Sometimes it is belief and not the battle – 709
Step outside the room of your own railing – 769
The earth has known it – two million years – 759
The harp-winged hawk that hovers and plucks – 706
The Iberian anthem of my spirit has no lyrics – 776
The nodding sea survives our crossing – 783
The quick fingers of the fiddler learn – 764
The wind has never sought me for advice – 708
There is always the choir and the crowd – 773
There is in my spirit an ache of iron – 719
These bones of mine are rattling runes – 770
This time of quiet I will claim as mine – 790
To be allowed to age is to unfold – 792
Tumult and turbine, the roar around us – 728
We are born into the fecund forest – 748
We are kindest to our own thinking and pounce – 778
We fit our faith into tomorrow mostly – 786
Were the number of wonders only eight – 701
Were we not born more capacious – 734
What care I if the earth is cold and bare – 717
What is this able and ambulatory body – 772
When busy-fingered chaos stirs through – 743
When the world without comes crowding down – 710
Why must the New Year’s beginning be – 705
With all about us now ablaze, the origami – 729
Would there were a tourniquet for time – 703

And if you are curious to read where these lines lead and land, start here.

Thanks for spending a few moments with my work. Even if it is only for a sliver of the entire 14-line compositions in this collection.

Stay wild and stay well.

Nicholas Korn
Poet of The Wild Sonnets