November Sestina

Now November slips away, half gone already
the spring concedes to summer and the birds call
long into the cloudy warm-pink night.
The city lives and breathes, in days of beer and river water
and, everywhere, the open doorway beckons
and the year that hurt us has laid down arms at last.

So, now, we drink every latte like it is our last
that lesson lodged deep in our guts already
the dice roll of every unknown future beckons;
the chance geometry of shrouded angel’s call.
But here we still are, born and once drowned in water:
here we still are, holding candles to the night.

And now day is renewed, and the night
for us, is over, and fear ebbs now at last.
In joyful mass we all surge back to water
to swim and grow sun-reddened; forgotten already
the other dangers here under this sky. No call
to memory undoes the way life beckons.

Ahead, the season of the solstice beckons
the preparation for our shortest night.
The open shops all ply their siren’s call
in baubles, trees and carols first and last.
Perhaps, this time, the truth is known already;
perhaps we all have been renewed in water.

And here we do not give thanks in November; no blessing water
flows through our hands to wash us clean, or beckons
to bow our heads and own aloud our mercy. Already
we are forgetting the deepest ink of night.
The miracle and the sadness is the way nothing will last:
not joy but not pain either, and not sweet summer’s call.

The year that hurt us ends in a quiet call:
We live, and laugh, and hold each other, the water
sanctified with the release of hearts at last.
For other places, a different passage beckons;
and winter closes in with hard cold night.
With tender hands, we hold our gift already:

This bright blue sky, this future born already
this daily-stronger farewell to the night,
this star-point now from which a new year beckons.

A Sestina for the Ones Who Said (Poem)

This is a sestina based on the found poem idea, but with a twist to make it much harder for myself because - why not!

What I did was go to my six most visited websites (excluding social media and portals for services) and randomly select a line from what was on their front page, to form the first stanza. In order, these are:

The Guardian Australia
Ask A Manager
Captain Awkward
Gimlet Media
Girls Will Be Girls (Literary Journal)
Overland (Literary Journal)

(Yes, I am that boring OK).

So here we go ... I'm calling it A Sestina for the Ones Who Said. It's turned into a thing about the Thing, which I guess is not surprising, given the mood at the moment.

We are not very caring.
How clear are you being when you say no?
Everything is twice as hard and takes twice as long:
We go back to the time our divisions turned into war,
Not for male consumption -
I am still learning how to protect my own consent.

A twisted tangled mess where there should be consent
But to understand the depths of it requires caring:
To truly see a person, not a body for consumption.
To hear the ways in which the multitudinous No
is given: in shout or whisper; semaphore; portents of war.
The act measured in minutes, its shadow dragging long.

It feels this journey has been so long,
and so unfinished, while old men in power debate consent
and what it means. Pitching it like it is a culture war,
like the young, the vulnerable, the women are somehow wrong for caring:
like there is something mutable about the No
like resisting is revolution, an affront to consumption.

And everywhere, it's packaged for consumption:
Sex sells, and with it, the dark ideal of access; for so long
there has been permission to not hear the No.
Do we really own our own consent?
In the broken mirror, we see the shards of caring -
And power and the powerless in uneven war.

Some write polemics about a gender war,
Which is just deflection, packaged neat for angry male consumption.
The contempt that reeks for all that reflects caring:
The paradigm has held up for so long,
Regardless of the threadbare-thin consent,
We did not agree, but no-one heard the No.

The day is coming, when we'll shout the NO
and call out power and the running dogs of war
and start to learn the value of consent.
When the only thing we line up for consumption
is the food and drink we share, as days grow long
and the cruel will become weak, and all power vest in caring.

And although it hurts, we cannot turn from caring:
Power seems so firm, and yet its fall is long;
And hearts rebuild, and love usurps consumption.

- Kathy, 12/11/17

(This is NaBloPoMo post #12. 12 down, 18 to go!)

Bronte Beach Sestina

Here, the spring is warm and full with blue-gold sun;
The sea stretches, white-tipped, to the line of sky.
Children dragooned into scenic walks plunge into the water,
finally unfettered, like slick otters dancing.
On the sand, toddlers dig and build,
and a sarong-clad woman's phone plays Hallelujah.

The afternoon wears on to Hallelujah
threading silvered notes against the sun.
The toddlers seem to know just what to build
Above, cumulus wavers in the powder sky
If you close your eyes you might see angels dancing
bemused by joy, before the salty water.

The purity of colour in the water
is enough to draw the Hallelujah.
At harbour's edge where tired men are dancing
doing yoga in the gentle sun.
Seagulls drop like aircraft from the sky
to knock away all that children build.

High above, the one percent will build
gold-plated aeries overlooking water.
Houses nestling down under the sky -
But no one owns the sweet-sung Hallelujah
or the scent of wind-borne saline in the sun;
No one gets to say who will be dancing.

In the surf, five children now are dancing,
dainty on their toes as the waves build.
The midday heat is fading from the sun
and they wince and laugh while in the stone cold water.
One of them sways in time with Hallelujah
telescoping in and out to the wide sky.

From the sand, a woman thinks of sky
and how the stars are always lover-dancing.
How the wave-boom sings a Hallelujah
and every mote is something that you build
every tiny thing is born of water
and lies, surfeited, drying in the sun.

And in a quiet place, the verses start to build
a quiet paeon to the three-shade water
toes in sand, and head tipped to the sun.

- Kathy, 27/09/17

Lovesong Sestina (Poem)

Separately, neither one was anyone much.
One liked swimming, blue porcelain and Ceylon tea,
and worked in an office above a bakery.
The other, with an eye for beauty, sketched on Sunday,
and painted stranger's fingernails all through the week.
Both their hearts were gem-blue like the sea.

They met on a park bench by the sea.
It was a cold spring that year, and no-one much
had been about the esplanade all week.
It was natural enough, the decision to go in search of tea
Almost everywhere was closed, for Sunday,
until they found a tiny bakery.

The good scent of yeast and cinnamon from the bakery
drew them in as rain came from the sea.
The windows steamed in sticky comfort that Sunday.
They talked about nothing, or at least nothing much
of significance, as they drank their tea;
it felt like time expanded, an hour filled a week

Such a pity to have to work this week,
sighed the one who worked above the bakery.
I'd rather stay, with you, here, drinking tea -
Despite the cold and rainfall by the sea.
The artist said, With me? I can't bring much
to add to the shininess of Sunday -

Every day with you would be a Sunday
If I could, I'd be with you eight days a week -
said the swimmer, and the artist said not much
but reached a hand out, gently, in the bakery
Their fingers touching, joyous as the sea
as the lady from the kitchen poured their tea.

Eventually, they reached the limit of the tea
they could usefully drink; and wandered out into Sunday.
Dusk was sidling in, all shy-gold from the sea;
The artist said: Forget about the week -
I'll leave mine too, forgotten in the bakery
I don't know when I ever wanted this much

Then they kissed, and it was much too much
and at the same time, stardust, outside the bakery
and time folded open, and it was the first week.

- Kathy, 8/09/17

Flood ( A Sestina)

This poem is my first attempt at a sestina. It's a really tricky form but I wanted to give it a go. I doubt I am going to become one of the great sestina poets (hello, Elizabeth Bishop, lookin' at you!) but it was a good discipline to try it.

The sestina form has seven stanzas (six with six lines and the final with three) with a very strict repeating rhyme pattern, represented as follows where each letter stands for the final word of the line.

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

In my poem, the repeated words are:

A = Sign
B = Ask
C = Hurricane
D = Water
E = Map
F = Flee

FLOOD

Some say floods in Texas are a sign;
Of what, it depends on who you ask.
Brought in fast and deep by a hurricane -
Looking from above, the earth is blanketed in water
Entire towns wiped off the survey map
Posits of recovery variable, for those that flee.

Everywhere, across the earth, they flee;
Bleeding borders, searching for a sign
of harbour in some quiet corner of the map.
Refuge seems so much and little now to ask
where injustice flows like living water
and silences are drowned in hurricane.

The future blows in harder than a hurricane;
the tech ascendant, nowhere now to flee
from the satellites that target over water.
Every spacedust signal is a sign:
Obscured by not knowing how to ask,
how to find the real within the cosmic map.

And yet, and yet, the heart resists a map:
Love and fear a double hurricane
of cone-tight, star-bright feeling; why even ask
why people are the way they are; why they flee
from that which brings them joy, and seek a sign
of truth in misery, of death under the water.

Once, it's said, a god drowned us in water;
Flicked out an enraged hand and cleaned the map.
Eventually a dove came as a sign -
In later days we ride the hurricane
Turn the stove up under the world's bones, and flee
from the questions no one dares to ask.

We get the times we get, and have to ask
what we bring with us to give; born of water,
still mammals in the marrow, even if we flee
the sillage of good earth in our gene map.
Sentience sometimes a hurricane -
All the world is wonder, each falling star a sign.

And the nights hold secrets, refusing us a sign;
No foreshadow of the last great hurricane.
Living never did come with a map.

- Kathy, 2/09/2017