The Poetry Seven Attempt Sestinas

This month my poetry sisters and I are working on writing Sestinas. It's a very difficult form to get the knack for, partly because the end words are extremely restricted. Each of the six-line stanzas use the same words in a spiral repetition. The best sestinas, IMO, tell a story. My favorite one is this by Elizabeth Bishop. Kelly has a wonderful explanation with tips on how to write one here.

For our sestinas we chose twelve words in common, each of us picking the six we wanted to use. We then got down to business with only a little moaning and complaining about the struggle to wrangle those six words into something making sense and beauty. I pulled up a memory of a fishing trip from my childhood and twisted it into shape with the end words "here, wind, turn, break, wave, up". My poem has gone through many revisions, and I'm not sure it's done yet. Here it is:

  Hornets 

Good fishing here.

From the canoe our lines wound

across the creek, turning

slowly under the water, breaking

the line of waves.

Gradually the breeze picked up.

Drifting downstream, you never think of up.

How it’s a long fight back. Hearing

the gentle slap of larger waves,

we still didn’t notice the wind

until a bird broke

the silence and the day turned.

Years later and still stung, we will turn,

look at each other and wonder, what was up?

What was it that broke?

If only we could have heard

then the warning in the rising wind

or seen the trout slip away under the waves.

We thought we knew those waves.

We knew how fish calmly turn

away from the hook, but not how the cool wind

easily tosses the line up

clear into the trees. Here

we were, tangled in line that wouldn’t break.

To get that tackle we had to break

a hornet’’s nest and beat their wave

of fury. This bend in the creek here

they thought to own, to turn

into a paper castle up

in trees rocked by wind.

Hornets are at home in wind.

One cast is all it took to break

the peace. One hook tossed up;

flicked quickly over the waves

where hornets, trout, and children turn

thinking it’s always their own HERE.

Now one fights the wind, and we all ride the wave.

We wait for the break when everything turns.

Every morning we look up and we are all still here.

  -Andromeda Jazmon

 

Please visit the blogs of my Poetry Sisters to read their sestinas:

Trisha Stohr Hunt

Kelly R. Fineman

Liz Garton Scanlon

Laura Purdie Salas

Tanita S. Davis

Next month we are working writing the form Raccontino, which I have never done before. I've never been fond of rhymed couplets, so...  should be interesting. For today you can hop right over to Robyn Campbell's blog, where she is hosting Friday Poetry!