Sestina: Morning Numbers
A Poem of Love, Regret and How to Write a Sestina
(Notice the playfulness in the variations such as using the word "theory" in place of the word "three". The trick to writing good formal poetry is to use the structure as a support beam rather than a gallows which strangles the joy and the unexpected turn of phrase from the poem.)
Morning Numbers
The morning light catches one
still abed. On the window ledge two
birds, long awake, build a nest for three.
This is what morning is for:
your life is like a clock you set five
minutes early; each morning you run the next six
hours and the last six
years over in your mind (one
mindboggling, heartstopping and five
not entirely terrible years are too
much to bear close remembering) For-
get everything but small details. Three
buttons on his shirt, the same three
you sewed on again and again until you were sick
to death of buttons. What were you doing it for?
They wouldn't stay. Not one.
You asked him if he was trying to
tell you something. (Something it took him five
years to say.) Your life ticks on unsteadily. Five
years is a lot of ticks. The time you wasted (sewing three
buttons on ungrateful sleeves) will never come back to
you. Okay at chemistry, Love or perhaps Sex,
is a lousy math teacher. The sum of one
and one is one. And then one again. We have time for
another lesson. Outside, birds and street noise for-
get their fear of heights and settle five
to a ledge. The light is won
over and loves them in theory
the way the camera "loves" a starlet. (sic)
Loves their useless heroism, the precarious egg too.
Finds it beautiful. All too
beautiful. This nest feathered with risk for
the sapphire egg: a treasure box made of sticks,
leaves, string, heavy mud and five
impossible inches of stolen ribbon --set on a three
inch ledge of cold, certain stone. The right won
to wave its victory flag; all red, fraying five
formidable inches of it. The whole earth re-
won in air in a room six inches by six.
Published by G.L. Morrison
With sundry awards, magazines & anthologies to her credit, Morrison's taught writers @conferences in Portland, Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, NYC and Washington DC at the Library of Congress. View profile
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3 Comments
Post a CommentVery, very interesting and creative! I had not thought to do that. I hope you will read my sentina too.
i wonder what a sestina is...hmmm.got to read again.:)ill tell you whenever i can write one too. hopefully:)
What talent! I am most interested in reading this again.TX for sharing your wisdom in this form of poetry.