Rewriting Shakespeare (as free verse)

Sonnet 18 Redux

I cannot compare you to a summer day, my love.
You are far more beautiful and your smile more warm:
for the anger of the wind tears at the heart of May,
and summer’s four month lease leaves her homeless every year.
I am claustrophobic in August’s heat,
and even the freedom of thunderstorms is terrifying.
Everything beautiful occasionally fades,
begging for a few moments of break from long shifts.
But your loveliness, my dear, is untiring,
you will never lose your electricity of spirit,
the eyes of the afterlife will never follow you down the street.
In these meager lines, when time tries to swallow you whole,

you will live as long as men breathe, as eyes see,
as long as this poem exists, darling, so do you.



Sonnet 116 Redux

There can be no objection to true love.
Issue can only be found if the love
changes when it finds that the object of its affections has changed.
If there is an attempt to change the mind of love
and it is changed, there is no love.
Love is the steadiest of headlights,
the perfectly aligned markers on the edge of the runway,
guiding every plane through fog and storm.
Love may be known but it cannot be measured.
Time cannot shift honest love, even should a child experience it;
it is not a different love. Though it be born
of a brief and innocent life, it will last the apocalypse.

If this love is a lie, if every love dies,
I have never written, nor have I loved.