Sonnet: “Dispatches from the Western Front”

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In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, University of Wyoming student Zack Anderson began advertising his services around campus. The English and French major is offering customized sonnets for a fee. Wyoming Public Media requested that Anderson write a love poem… for us.

Here, nigh the end of our postmodern age,

the news is bred on free-range server farms

and in the brains of citizenry rage

incertitude, distress, ennui, alarm,

complacency.  These bitter villains leach

the human spirit from our cynic scene.

Forgotten is the bliss of breathing speech,

the Word is writ in pixels on a screen.

But Radio’s vox populi remains

in modulated frequencies of truth,

and beaming out above the wind-burned plains

transmissions that no ignorance can mute.

Radio, though other media fall,

yours is the voice that may unite us all.

--Zack Anderson