Sestina!

Hey guys. Guys. Look who's following through :D

I've decided to make Lyric a longterm project for myself. Every time I feel like I'm coming close to the end of it I read through it again and see how much I need to change and take out, and how much it's departing from what I want it to be. I think I've put too much time into that one to be happy putting out any version of it that wasn't pretty much perfect, and perfection takes time. It's also not the point of this blog.

So, for the sake of productivity, that will be my personal project from now on, and I'll let you know when it's done. In the meantime, here's a finished-ish version of the sestina I promised.


How they love and how they die

Something sinister was on the move. Invisible, probably,

or maybe underground.

The villagers had shut themselves,

their children

and their mothers away, inside their houses,

where they were safe. Such was their conviction.

They stayed strong in their conviction,

with good reason, probably.

In their houses

they had bibles and blankets and canned soup, and their children, and themselves, and underground

the others, and the other children.

But not the living. Not yet themselves.

They wrapped the blankets round the children and their arms around themselves,

and then they were warm, and they were safe in their conviction.

They thought of clever stories to tell the children,

and when they didn’t work anymore they told them it would all be over soon. Probably.

And they wondered if they felt things shuffling underground

and strange noises outside their houses.

They sealed the windows of the houses

and kept the bad air and the noises away from themselves.

They tried not think about the spaces underground,

not to imagine themselves there, not to shift in their conviction

that this, this thing they were doing, that this was the right thing, probably,

for themselves. For the children.

They would stay strong for the children.

They had to. They lit candles and imagined the warmth filling their houses,

the way they’d been told the sun would soon, probably.

They wouldn’t admit it to themselves

if they started to doubt. They would sit and wait for the conviction

to return, and they would hold the space between their loved ones and the things underground.

They wouldn’t admit it to themselves, that they weren’t sure they remembered ‘underground’,

or ‘outside’. They repeated the stories of the old times to their children

and they heard the words they spoke with such conviction,

and they usually believed themselves. There were still things outside the houses,

people besides themselves.

And they would see them all again, they said. Probably.

They had stopped hearing anything underground, though they still told the children

to step lightly. And when they felt convicts of their own conviction, prisoners of their houses,

they told themselves it would all be over soon, probably.

I think the best thing to do with sestinas is try to use the forced repetition to your advantage in some way. I hope I kind of pulled that off here. What's actually going on is supposed to be ambiguous, but I'm interested in your interpretations. Bonus points to anyone who can identify the source of the title.

New post coming on monday!