A shorter poem is more likely read.
My haiku and my sonnets are my art.
And when at last the physical is dead
the words may keep the longings of my heart.

With syllables but seventeen I hope
to stir a silence into sounds and sights
that stretch the mind to know more ways to cope
responding to both warnings and delights.

And fourteen lines should be enough I think
to agitate or calm the questing souls
who do at truth not slink away or blink
but make their peace by learning life's controls.

Some ask why write in these constricted forms?
I answer comfort lies in well-worn norms.

- Robert Stone, 8 July 2012