Cremation Sonnet
How can it be my fault to get things wrong?
You died and I loved you, my life was over.
So what if at the time I did not pay attention.
So what, you loved Paul better than George,
your faith was no less farcical than anyone’s,
so what if I felt nothing until I made up how I felt
and so what if my feelings cannot be corroborated?
Yes, there were people sadder than myself.
There may even be someone who, after
eleven years carrying ash in every breast pocket
decides she will launder all her clothes. So what?
I cannot accept this ending. I have fallen
from the highest ledge. I will never land.
So what if I am safe? I am not.
Cremation Sonnet
So I’ll never learn how to pronounce
correctly my last name, so what.
In The Royal Tenenbaums Royal Tenenbaum
whose big thing is that his children are failures
and who for thirty minutes of the film
has been faking stomach cancer just to be loved says
This closeness to death… It’s had a profound effect on me
and we’re supposed to laugh, so I did laugh,
I pretended towards lightheartedness,
I broke myself from you, I took a pious look
at the wallpaper on the screen; Art, I thought,
can obviously be larger than my attachment to it…
Of course, after all that, Royal Tenenbaum dies
of a heart attack, and nobody has anything to say.
Sophie van Waardenberg is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand and a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA in Creative Writing, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her writing can be found in Rhino, Cordite, Best New Zealand Poems, and Copper Nickel.