SONNET — TO LOVE - By: Lizard Z.

Strange Love! ye blind us with thy gilded light!

Thy gentle rays burn crueller than the Sun;

Thy hands—of trick’ry!—seize all in thy sight;

Thy finger-tips twist men’s heart-strings undone.

Of all things lovely thou alone dost grieve!

Men shiver—mournful—*longing*—for thy gloom;

Of all things lovely thou alone dost thieve!—

—The paths of men in journey to the tomb.

Lush Love! thou smile’st!—all kindly in thy lies—

Rich Love! to heart thou’rt as wine is to mind;

Curs’d Love! the spite of Eros in thine eyes—

—But Love, thou give’st such *beauty* to our kind.

As Man doth slumber—*dreaming* of thy face—

—So, too, sweet Love, lives thy eternal grace.

Please give a detailed explanation about the meaning and main idea of this poem.

This poem is, suffice to say, about the condition of human love. Love hides behind its thin veneer of kindness, showing to us only the palatable version of itself that the media ensures we are fed. But in reality—and we all realise this sooner or later—love is terrible. Love is cruel. Love is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. Yet we're addicted to it, because love is simultaneously the best thing. It is a drug, and it will live on as long as Man lives, sleeping and dreaming.

Please explain your writing and thought process regarding this poem.

I am a young queer person experiencing young queer love. And even though I may be a minority in the grand scheme of things, I felt love, just like so many others do. I felt all its universal pain and beauty, and I felt it layered with thousands more of my own unique experiences.

Why did you choose to write this poem?

Love is a beautiful, fickle, horrible thing, and it's something that unites us as part of the human experience—but at the same time, the way we feel and express it is unique to us as individuals. Thus, I wanted to write a poem to express the way I personally felt—to express its wonderful paradoxical nature in a style that I felt was true to me and appealed to me best, the Shakespearean sonnet.

Do you have any tips or anything to share with the youth writers who may be reading this?

You can ask a thousand people to paint a tree, referenceless, and no two paintings will look the same. The universe is infinite not because it has infinite space or infinite time, but because there are infinite possibilities.