Sestina for the Passion of Christ

(Matthew 26:14 – 27:66 or John 18:1 – 19:42)

 

He is alone in prayer in the garden, knowing the cost.
His followers care, but flesh is frail and they fail
to fend off sleep as Jesus endures his mortal fear
with faithfulness. This night will bring betrayal,
abandonment, suffering, and ultimately, a cross.
But he will not turn from obeying the will of God.

He is alone in facing trial for blaspheming God.
The religious rulers are determined at any cost
to be rid of this nuisance Jesus. But though they cross
words, set their traps for him, they almost fail.
Judas’ earlier duplicity is matched by betrayal
of truth; and the rest of Jesus’ followers have fled in fear.

He is alone in front of Pilate, but showing no fear.
Is he King of the Jews? Is he somehow from God?
Pilate doesn’t know, doesn’t really care. Betrayal
of justice doesn’t bother him much, the only cost
he worries about is the empire’s peace. Fail
and he’d pay the price; so send this King to the cross,

it’s an easy call. Kill the pest, quiet the Jews. The cross
is just another tool when you rule by fear,
after all, so why be worried about truth? (This fails,
somehow, to ease his mind; but he holds the power of God,
of life and death, so death it will be, at Jesus’ cost.)
And Pilate’s lethal injustice is the final betrayal.

Jesus is alone, crowned with the thorns of betrayals.
He is mocked and whipped and abused, and the cross
is placed on his shoulders, and the high cost
of love mounts the hill of the Skull. Fear
only forgetting love’s suffering; forget not the grief of God,
as the sky grows dark as if the sun itself has failed.

Do the women wonder if faith has failed
as Jesus is laid in the tomb? Is hope’s betrayal
on Joseph’s mind, as he wraps this man from God
in burial cloth? The death of Christ on the cross
for many meant grief, despair and fear;
only later would they understand what was worth the cost:

that we are not alone in times of fear, nor when we fail
– bearing the costs of our small and large betrayals –
nor even in death: for Jesus, God’s Son, died for us on the cross.

--Andrew King, from his blog A Poetic Kind of Place

Image: Crucifixion, by Greg Weatherby

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.

In the failing light, the old grandmother

sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), poet and translator, US Poet Laureate 1949-1950, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner

Ethel's Sestina

Ethel Freeman's body sat for days in her wheelchair outside the New Orleans Convention Center. Her son Herbert, who had assured his mother that help was on the way, was forced to leave her there once she died.

Gon’ be obedient in this here chair, 

gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun. 

I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait. 

He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep. 

I trust his every word. Herbert my son. 

I believe him when he says help gon’ come. 

Been so long since all these suffrin’ folks come 

to this place. Now on the ground ’round my chair, 

they sweat in my shade, keep asking my son 

could that be a bus they see. It’s the sun 

foolin’ them, shining much too loud for sleep, 

making us hear engines, wheels. Not yet. Wait. 

Lawd, some folks prayin’ for rain while they wait, 

forgetting what rain can do. When it come, 

it smashes living flat, wakes you from sleep, 

eats streets, washes you clean out of the chair 

you be sittin’ in. Best to praise this sun, 

shinin’ its dry shine. Lawd have mercy, son, 

is it coming? Such a strong man, my son. 

Can’t help but believe when he tells us, Wait. 

Wait some more. Wish some trees would block this sun. 

We wait. Ain’t no white men or buses come, 

but look—see that there? Get me out this chair, 

help me stand on up. No time for sleepin’, 

cause look what’s rumbling this way. If you sleep 

you gon’ miss it. Look there, I tell my son. 

He don’t hear. I’m ’bout to get out this chair, 

but the ghost in my legs tells me to wait, 

wait for the salvation that’s sho to come. 

I see my savior’s face ’longside that sun. 

Nobody sees me running toward the sun. 

Lawd, they think I done gone and fell asleep. 

They don't hear Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Ain’t but one power make me leave my son. 

I can’t wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can’t wait. 

Don’t cry, boy, I ain’t in that chair no more. 

Wish you coulda come on this journey, son, 

seen that ol’ sweet sun lift me out of sleep. 

Didn’t have to wait. And see my golden chair?

--Patricia Smith (1955- ), award-winning African American poet, professor, poetry slam champion

Hurricane Katrina made landfall (for the second time after crossing Florida) near New Orleans on this day and at this hour in 2005.

Two Lorries

It's raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.

There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew's old lorry
Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman
With his Belfast accent's sweet-talking my mother.
Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?
But it's raining and he still has half the load

To deliver farther on. This time the lode
Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes
Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt
(Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry
With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother:
The tasty ways of a leather-aproned coalman!

And films no less! The conceit of a coalman ...
She goes back in and gets out the black lead
And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother,
All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes
With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry
Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt

And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt!
Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman
As time fastforwards and a different lorry
Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload
That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes ...
After that happened, I'd a vision of my mother,

A revenant on the bench where I would meet her
In that cold-floored waiting room in Magherafelt,
Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.
Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman
Refolding body-bags, plying his load
Empty upon empty, in a flurry

Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry
Was it now? Young Agnew's or that other,
Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode
In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt ...
So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman,
Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,
Then reappear from your lorry as my mother's
Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.

--Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), Irish poet, playwright, translator, and Nobel Prize Winner

Sestina of the Tramp-Royal

Speakin' in general, I 'ave tried 'em all,

The 'appy roads that take you o'er the world.
Speakin' in general, I 'ave found them good
For such as cannot use one bed too long,
But must get 'ence, the same as I 'ave done,
An' go observin' matters till they die.

What do it matter where or 'ow we die,
So long as we've our 'ealth to watch it all—
The different ways that different things are done,
An' men an' women lovin' in this world—
Takin' our chances as they come along,
An' when they ain't, pretendin' they are good?

In cash or credit—no, it aren't no good;
You 'ave to 'ave the 'abit or you'd die,
Unless you lived your life but one day long,
Nor didn't prophesy nor fret at all,
But drew your tucker some'ow from the world,
An' never bothered what you might ha' done.

But, Gawd, what things are they I 'aven't done?
I've turned my 'and to most, an' turned it good,
In various situations round the world—
For 'im that doth not work must surely die;
But that's no reason man should labour all
'Is life on one same shift; life's none so long.

Therefore, from job to job I've moved along.
Pay couldn't 'old me when my time was done,
For something in my 'ead upset me all,
Till I 'ad dropped whatever 'twas for good,
An', out at sea, be'eld the dock-lights die,
An' met my mate—the wind that tramps the world!

It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you're readin' done,
An' turn another—likely not so good;
But what you're after is to turn 'em all.

Gawd bless this world! Whatever she 'ath done—
Excep' when awful long—I've found it good.
So write, before I die, "'E liked it all!"

--Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English poet, novelist, journalist, and short-story writer

Sestina

I saw my soul at rest upon a day 

     As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,
Among soft leaves that give the starlight way
     To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;
So that it knew as one in visions may,
     And knew not as men waking, of delight.

This was the measure of my soul's delight;
     It had no power of joy to fly by day,
Nor part in the large lordship of the light;
     But in a secret moon-beholden way
Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night,
     And all the love and life that sleepers may.

But such life's triumph as men waking may
     It might not have to feed its faint delight
Between the stars by night and sun by day,
     Shut up with green leaves and a little light;
Because its way was as a lost star's way,
     A world's not wholly known of day or night.

All loves and dreams and sounds and gleams of night
     Made it all music that such minstrels may,
And all they had they gave it of delight;
     But in the full face of the fire of day
What place shall be for any starry light,
     What part of heaven in all the wide sun's way?

Yet the soul woke not, sleeping by the way,
     Watched as a nursling of the large-eyed night,
And sought no strength nor knowledge of the day,
     Nor closer touch conclusive of delight,
Nor mightier joy nor truer than dreamers may,
     Nor more of song than they, nor more of light.

For who sleeps once and sees the secret light
     Whereby sleep shows the soul a fairer way
Between the rise and rest of day and night,
     Shall care no more to fare as all men may,
But be his place of pain or of delight,
     There shall he dwell, beholding night as day.

Song, have thy day and take thy fill of light
     Before the night be fallen across thy way;
Sing while he may, man hath no long delight.

--Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), English poet, writer, critic, and playwright

Sestina

I have come, alas, to the great circle of shadow,
to the short day and to the whitening hills,
when the colour is all lost from the grass,
though my desire will not lose its green,
so rooted is it in this hardest stone,
that speaks and feels as though it were a woman.

And likewise this heaven-born woman
stays frozen, like the snow in shadow,
and is unmoved, or moved like a stone,
by the sweet season that warms all the hills,
and makes them alter from pure white to green,
so as to clothe them with the flowers and grass.

When her head wears a crown of grass
she draws the mind from any other woman,
because she blends her gold hair with the green
so well that Amor lingers in their shadow,
he who fastens me in these low hills,
more certainly than lime fastens stone.

Her beauty has more virtue than rare stone.
The wound she gives cannot be healed with grass,
since I have travelled, through the plains and hills,
to find my release from such a woman,
yet from her light had never a shadow
thrown on me, by hill, wall, or leaves' green.

I have seen her walk all dressed in green,
so formed she would have sparked love in a stone,
that love I bear for her very shadow,
so that I wished her, in those fields of grass,
as much in love as ever yet was woman,
closed around by all the highest hills.

The rivers will flow upwards to the hills
before this wood, that is so soft and green,
takes fire, as might ever lovely woman,
for me, who would choose to sleep on stone,
all my life, and go eating grass,
only to gaze at where her clothes cast shadow.

Whenever the hills cast blackest shadow,
with her sweet green, the lovely woman
hides it, as a man hides stone in grass.

--Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet, writer, and philosopher, one of the greatest poets who ever lived

Forage Sestina

This is for your body hidden in words
moving through a crumbling structure.
Between heaps of plaster, chicken-wire
snaggles the gaping floor. Stripped of beams,
cement encloses more cement. A wall
mounds up between parlor and dining-room.

Explicit shadows grapple through the room
which is a ruined city. Falling words
erode veined gullies in the nearer wall.
This is to see if only structure
communicates. Under a beam
an outlet spouts tongues of stripped wire

and you breath crackles like a shorted wire.
You are standing behind me, even in this room
which is a camouflage. Signal beams
flash through the casement, and our words
cadence them, shushed with light, making a structure
of light and sound bouncing off the bare wall.

I want to touch you, but you are the wall
crumbling, the report over the wire
service that there were no survivors. Structure
demands that we remain inside the room,
that you cannot be hedged in easy words
like skin or hands, that we cannot look through the beams

of the burnt roof and see stars. All the beams
were hauled off. Concrete floor, ceiling, walls
surround us. There is one window. Words
cannot be trusted. Capillaries wire
swiveling eyes. If we search this room
we may be able to plot out the structure

of the whole building. We were told that the structure
is flawed, that the searchlight beam
from the bridge pierces cracks. If the room
begins to rotate, floor becoming wall
et cetera, and white sparks dribble from torn wires,
there has been a rebellion of words.

Words will peel off you, revealing the structure
of a human body branched with wires. Over the last beam
keeping the sky from the walls, vines drip into the room.

--Marilyn Hacker (1942- ), American formalist poet, feminist, editor

Six Words

yes

no

maybe

sometimes

always

never 

Never? 

Yes. 

Always? 

No. 

Sometimes? 

Maybe— 

maybe 

never 

sometimes. 

Yes— 

no 

always: 

always 

maybe. 

No— 

never 

yes.

Sometimes, 

sometimes 

(always) 

yes. 

Maybe 

never . . . 

No, 

no— 

sometimes. 

Never. 

Always? 

Maybe. 

Yes— 

yes no 

maybe sometimes 

always never.

--Lloyd Schwarz (1941- ), poet, poet laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts, critic, professor, commentator

A Miracle for Breakfast

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee, 

waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
—like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds—along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
—I saw it with one eye close to the crumb—

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.


-- Elizabeth Bishop, American poet.

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits in thunder, 

Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, 

From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country." 

Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How pleasant 

To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she scratched 

Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach 

 And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach. 

"M'love," he intercepted, "the plains are decked out in thunder 

Today, and it shall be as you wish." He scratched 

The part of his head under his hat. The apartment 

Seemed to grow smaller. "But what if no pleasant 

Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country." 

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country. 

Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach 

When the door opened and Swee'pea crept in. "How pleasant!" 

But Swee'pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. "Thunder 

And tears are unavailing," it read. "Henceforth shall Popeye's apartment 

Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched."

 

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched 

Her long thigh. "I have news!" she gasped. "Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country 

One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment 

And all that it contains, myself and spinach 

In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder 

At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant 

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant 

Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched 

Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder." 

She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country." 

"But you can't do that—he hasn't even finished his spinach," 

Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment. 

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment 

Succumbed to a strange new hush. "Actually it's quite pleasant 

Here," thought the Sea Hag. "If this is all we need fear from spinach 

Then I don't mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over"—she scratched 

One dug pensively—"but Wimpy is such a country 

Bumpkin, always burping like that." Minute at first, the thunder 

 Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder, 

The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched 

His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

--John Ashbery (1927-2017), New York-born poet, poet laureate of New York State 2001-2003, critic, professor, and playwright