a sonnet for scicomm

i decided to compose a sonnet about the science communication program. mainly because i wanted to write a sonnet. but i also felt like restraining my writing to fit within a specific structure would make me more deliberate about what i included and more in touch with what things i associate the strongest with being here.

i wrote the sonnet to encapsulate how complex the year has been: good and bad, funny and sad, inspiring and frustrating. there’s a fair amount of inside jokes, a little bit of love for sudbury even though i complain about it all the time, nods to the field of science and technology studies, and references to both the highs and lows of the year thus far.

so anyway, a sonnet is in iambic pentameter which sounds kind of like this:

duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH.

say it out loud so you get it right. i promise it will only be sort of embarrassing.

an iamb is one duh-DUH and there are five of them in each line, so, pentameter.

iambic pentameter is kind of like your heart beat, but like, a poem.

shakespeare liked to follow a rhyme scheme like this:

abab cdcd efef gg.

so i did too. because why come up with something unique when i can just copy the best sonneteer? i learned that’s a word today—sonneteer. a writer of sonnets.

here’s a poem by an apparent sonneteer.

a sonnet for scicomm

can scicomm be distilled into an art?

or a precise science that is sublime?

an eloquent poetic truth imparts

a clarity that can shift paradigms.

chantal taught us to differentiate

behaviours breaking through museum days.

and slag and stacks as bears of black collate

in this, a crater where the earth gave way.

remember all the people meerna blessed.

and trees don’t talk apparently it seems.

and some of us are cursed—bad luck, unless,

perhaps the strike is still haunting my dreams.

so follow me along this frozen wake

the ice is cracking on onwatin lake

-jeremiah yarmie