"hide-and-seek" [sonnet]

A feeling moves within me
as wind moves in the trees
what happiness is in me!
a leaf is in the breeze

I'm swayed by luring sadness
does meekness make me grand?
how lucid grows my madness!
I've failed to understand

Perhaps the love that sears me
and soothes me is a glimpse
of how my own soul nears me
yet fools me? Ever since

it started its hide-and-seek
I've felt so strong and weak



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[This began as an odd exercise -- an attempt to transform to verse a prose-poem that the author (Jon Aristides) dashed off in a satirizing effort to illustrate the literary fallacies and overall banality of poems of a certain ilk. At any rate, my exercise ended up demanding of me a more serious effort of imagination (and an abandoning of both satire and irony, though not of paradox) -- so (in short) the small poem has travelled in a different direction.]