Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back poet Gillian Freebody of New Jersey, who first debuted with us in Vulnerable, with “Post-College-Visit Sonnet Crown,” one of our poetry contest finalists. This sequence of five connected sonnets, each one beginning with a variation on the final line of the one before, explores feelings brought up as her daughter prepared to start college. Gillian reflects on the journey, with its heartache and disappointment, and encourages her daughter to explore her own voice.
“Become that fury. Lasso the mad pulse that beats/ Beneath your skin like a hurricane’s waves./ Own it. Sail the rage ship you harbor/ Into every port. Slam the mooring, throw the anchor,/ Topple the masts so even in sleep, the world/ Will hear you, wonder at the clamor on shore.”
In addition to the gorgeous formal structure that keeps the narrative advancing and deepening as we move from sonnet to sonnet, Gillian is remarkably open and willing to examine her mistakes and murky motivations. Balanced by her hope for her children, these struggles do not come across as failures but as the experiences of a woman still growing, still finding her way, learning to integrate her own rage and animal softness. She owns every part of her journey, weaving memory with dreamlike imagery that pulses with agency and dignity.
Read “Post-College-Visit Sonnet Crown” in Synkroniciti’s Dignity, Vol. 8, No. 3, available for $7 here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Gillian Freebody is a veteran writing teacher and single mom of two. Her poetry surprises her, surfacing as it often does, from the depths of an unpredictable subconscious.
Gillian is honored to be published in Synkroniciti for a second time. Her poem, “Post-College-Visit Sonnet Crown,” unfurled as her daughter starts her freshman year of college and her son begins his last year of elementary school. And “the whirligig of time” does its thing.