Sonneteering

Sheila at Enchiridion has a sonnet contest. This one was my entry:

As wide shores are rained with feeding dunlin,
so every place our drumming sin persists:
depot, hearth, school; our tenor-tide consists
so much of sin, needs we bury it in
a din, heirloomed from stranger, friend and kin;
while those appear upended that resist,
for by fulsome sin we make our sheen subsist:
we winnow, grind, knead digestible, sin.
Still the price of light's our stain's exposure;
but little demarked of our sins' bored tread,
spells some exposed, freely, on another:
as he who accepts light's light imposure
can no longer be the counterweight lead
that holds at mid-height, sister or brother.

I think it's the second or third sonnet I've written, and it was done specifically at the prompting of the contest. I remember trying to write a couple a few years back; posted them on a hefty poetry forum and they promptly got torn to shreds by acute criticism. They were deserving of that I'm sure.

I've noticed that in writing sonnets you get extremely dry, hard parts to write where literally every word comes out like a pathetic gasp; and then you get parts, particularly in the last five or so lines, that are so fluid that you can hardly even catch up with the words coming out.