The sestina is a form of poetry originating in the courts of 12th-century Provence. Here troubadours sang layered, puzzle-like songs for nobles. Each of the sestina’s six stanzas, six lines per stanza, flips the order of the six end words in use. The sestina’s highly specific pattern* creates a perfect completion in its weaving, the words spiraling back in on themselves by the end of the piece. The following sestina deviates from the traditional format* slightly: root words guide repetitions, and there is no envoi.
If What Dreams We Had Would Come
This string of days go on and on.
How long must I continue to wait?
I close my eyes. There is your face.
Will time provide something like
What used to be, what’s cast to the side
To be retrieved another time?
I remember a simpler time,
When dreams were what we built our days upon.
When worries lay on the wayside.
For nothing were we wanting, waiting.
My visions and what lay before/beside me, alike.
For any obstacle I was grounded, ready to face.
You could place me in the darkness, facing
Enough fears and apprehensions to fill a lifetime.
Try to poison my thoughts with the devil’s likeness.
But to your dismay, you meddling minions: I tread onward.
I need not drag my feet, trembling, waiting
For the sun to push the clouds aside.
It is in those very clouds that I reside.
The rain is tears of joy falling from my face.
Together we paint the rainbows. We are weightless.
Each day with you is a thousand lifetimes.
Each one another brick to build upon.
Wherever we are, there is home. We think. we live. we, alike.
And after years go by, and our eyes dim like
The sun tucking itself away inside
The folds of space and time we once walked on,
We both agree that laughter lines befit the face.
I trace the life-lines, love lines, skin-imprints of our lifetime,
And hand in hand we tuck our dreams away; in the stars we wait.
I shake myself awake, still waiting.
I add another day to that string-now-necklace¹ like
An awful omen. These beads² were meant for the time
When you come again to join me by my side—
When with my hands I could cup your lovely face.
But you, the subject of my dreams, became what they shattered on.
Δηλία, ~2016
¹, references an abacus, the ancient Chinese counting tool made from beads strung in lines secured within a wooden frame. An illustration of the weight of despair.
², the idea that time evidences relational endurance and loyalty, a reason to celebrate.
* THE SESTINA FORMAT:
Stanza 1 → 123456
Stanza 2 → 615243
Stanza 3 → 364125
Stanza 4 → 532614
Stanza 5 → 451362
Stanza 6 → 246531
Envoi-Ending (final 3 lines) All six words appear again, usually two per line, one embedded and one at the end:
Line 1 → word 2 + word 5
Line 2 → word 4 + word 3
Line 3 → word 6 + word 1
Æura Æra 