Sonnet

I'm the only poet in the writing group I found. Everyone else works on essays, memoir, stories, etc.  Last week, one fellow, an old curmudgeon, didn't like that I had shared a poem that didn't rhyme. So I wrote this for him and shared it today:

California

Perhaps it’s true, that I’d become myopic

living my whole life on the West Coast.

Conversations focused on two topics:

how California had become a ghost

of its former thriving self and when the

big earthquake would strike - an 8.0 -

and kill us like the tar pits of La Brea

wiped out the dinosaurs so long ago.

There was a sense of doom that hung like smog

and colored everything. Reminds me of   

an early morning beach shrouded in fog.

You know the sun is somewhere up above

shining somewhere else, just not for us.

You see now why we chose to move to Texas?

He said it should be longer. I explained a sonnet is only 14 lines. He said, "Then write a different kind of poem!"  Maybe next week I should bring in a pantoum. To my California friends, I don't mean to offend you! It's just my observation of the state of my native state which I still love!