"You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
What you say is completely up to you."
—Mrs. Whatsit, in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time
Does structure order the apparently random?
A veined and fragile leaf bright with new mist
Is chained to every tedious turn and twist
Of DNA: twined ladders rise in tandem.
The credulous take platitudes we hand them
And raise cathedrals, helpless to resist
A flash of light, uplifted Eucharist,
Till dubious salvation has unmanned them.
I find I'm more intrigued by happenstance,
The gaudy revels of the unforeseen,
Where love and longing do a drunken dance
With science, faith, and everything between.
Life, at its grandest, is no backward glance;
We cannot even say where we have been.