A semi-sonnet* on Christmas Day
Slow down, My son.
What makes you run, and run,
As if to catch the racing sun
As it rolls whence it begun?
Or are you looking for Someone,
Something, to fill your hungry heart
And energize each racing part;
Which, like a bounding, frightened hart
Can’t see the flowers or the trees
Because it thinks that it must flee
A distant danger, and thus be free
From the bullet of a smoking gun?
Slow down, My child, and cease to run.
Just rest your soul in My dear Son.
A sonnet is a one-stanza, 14-line poem, written in iambic pentameter. Each line has five "feet" of stressed and unstressed syllables. The English sonnet has a set rhyme scheme. For example, the Shakespearean sonnet follows this pattern: ABAB / CDCD / EFEF / GG.
My poem is not, strictly speaking a sonnet, in that (1) its lines are shorter and (2) its rhyme sequence departs from the usual norm. That is why I call it a "semi-sonnet."