Any photographer can tell you that the best time to take photographs is about an hour before sunset, when the sun is still bright and the shadows are long. That time is known as the Golden Hour. I tried to capture that here in this photograph and in my poetic verse. This bay is on the Mississippi River just across from the downtown area of St. Paul, Minnesota.

This poem is a Petrrarchan Sonnet.
The Petrarchan Sonnet is also known as the Italian Sonnet. The most famous early sonneteer was Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch). The Sonnet was created by Giacomo da Lentini, head of the Sicilian School under Emperor Frederick II. The first ones were written in Italian. The structure of a typical Italian sonnet of this time included two parts that together formed a compact form of "argument". First, the octave (two quatrains), forms the "proposition", which describes a "problem", or "question", followed by a sextet (two tercets), which proposes a "resolution". Typically, the ninth line initiates what is called the "turn", or "volta", which signals the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that don't strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the ninth line still often marks a "turn" by signaling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the poem.

Later, the a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a pattern became the standard for all Italian sonnets. For the closing sextet (last six lines) there were two different possibilities: c-d-e-c-d-e and c-d-c-c-d-c. In time, other variants on this rhyming scheme were introduced, such as c-d-c-d-c-d.

For this poem I chose the c-d-c c-d-c structure.
Therefore the complete rhyme scheme for this poem is:
abababba-cdccdc.

This photograph was taken by the author himself on January 8, 2012.

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