Conquering Chaos With a Sestina

 Yesterday, I was trying to read - Sunday afternoon reading Words of Delight by Leland Ryken. It's a great book, but my tumultuous thoughts couldn't settle down to calm receptivity after returning from the one social event of my week - going to church. Perhaps if I were less confined to home as a mother of littles, or less sensitive and shabby in health, church wouldn't seem like such a grand shaking up, but it is. 

 

Trying to read Ryken on artistry and organization in biblical poetry, all I could think was "I don't want to read about this right now - I need to actually do this - compose my own thoughts into poetry And I need to follow a close artistic structure, to contrast with and control the chaos of my own feelings. I'm going to write a sestina." 

 

 

So I looked up the rules for a sestina, grabbed a notebook and pencil and began. A child came into see me and brought me a requested eraser. Children did artwork at the dining table until I emerged a surprised hour and a half later (gazing proudly at my scribbled, crossed up, numbered lines) and made the hungry ones some popcorn, with a few tears dried on my cheeks. The poetry had done its work and I had spoken to my own heart what it needed to hear. Perhaps the Sunday morning lesson on the Pharisee and the tax collector and true religion came through a little in the circling lines.

 

 

Here is the typed-up version.

 

 

Sestina: Going to Church on the First Day of Spring

I go forth smiling, with my well-wrapped heart

Sweet sunshine flashes gold upon the breeze to meet me.

Today I shall be good, and I shall be a blessing -

Oh! blessed be those daffodils! that budding bush – be blessed!

Too long has been the winter and my loneliness!

We leave our drive, content to see the roadside trees go past.

How swift these roads, how soon the budding trees go past.

I muse upon arrival, friends, with well-wrapped heart.

The rolled-up miles accentuate and break my loneliness.

We tumble from the parking lot expecting faces glad to meet us

Oh blessed be old friends and new – I hope I may be blessed

As well, to be with them. And shall I be a blessing?

A conversation made, another greeted – I doubt I’ve been a blessing

Words fly so quickly, faces smile, turn onward and go past

Oh people who have listened to my tumbling words, be blessed!

I gather in the tatters of my once-wrapped heart

As other friends pass by and kindly meet me

Warm smiles, rare hugs – to melt the remnants of my loneliness.

A pause before the service makes me wistful for my loneliness

How can these hasty conversations be a blessing?
The service comes with sweet and weighty truths to meet me -

Hold every line, attend, lest needful words go past.

Present to God the ruins of your well-wrapped heart.

Oh that I might, despite absurdities and vice be blessed!

How shallow is my love today – shall I be blessed?
The God I praise felt closer to me in my loneliness

Than now, when others bear the crumbles of my unwrapped heart

Not gold, but clay – I wished to be a blessing.

Oh to have held the words that did go past

My tongue - and listened, loving, when they came to meet me.

My Lord, this is the place where you have pledged to meet me.

I come with tumbled mind and heart – oh to be blessed!

Despise me not for weakness or with grace go past

Me – needy, feeling now among my friends my loneliness.

If I have blessed or not – grant me at least this blessing -

Receive and mend the tatters of my unwrapped heart.

My friends - who smile, go past, or speak or come to meet me -

Receive my unwrapped heart, I wished you to be blessed

Despite taint of my loneliness, for you have been a blessing.

 

 

Prayer/Housewife

 In Malcolm Guite's Word in the Wilderness, he ends a series of poems following George Herbert's "Prayer" by suggesting that readers might be encouraged to write their own poem imaging prayer. Guite wrote "Prayer/Walk". This is my "Prayer/Housewife"

A whispered conversation in the dark;
remembering when it's easier to forget; 

the calm within a crowd of clatt'ring noise
(My children make requests - they do not whisper, or forget) 

a holding when I feel I'm letting go,
and letting go of things long held too dear; 

the bread found in the pantry at the front,
and at the back, the hoped-for, hidden chocolate; 

short walk to see the sun set by the pond,
regardless of the kitchen's dirty pans; 

hot shower after hours of grimy toil,
hastening to repose, tranquility snatched in bits,

need, want, and ought all bundled into one;
act of duty, spring of sudden joy.

 

Orange With a Stem

     "This one has a stem!"

    He held an orange

    from the grocery store bag,

    swaying, pendulous,

    on its slender bit of tree,

    come stowaway from California 

    on the fruit truck.

    "It's so thin! 

    How does it hold the orange?"

    As so often,

    a response,

    served out at my 

    inconvenience

    to feed a child's 

    insistent mind-hunger,

    answered hunger I'd forgotten

    was mine too -

    "When the orange was small

    the stem held it,

    every day the stem grew strong

    with the orange."

    I answered from the kitchen sink,

    rinsing knives free of soap,

    hands dripping,

    mind kindling,

    Have I grown strong?

    Children are heavy fruit.

 

    When the ripe days come,

    Will I be strong enough to let go? 

 

Virginie Demont-Breton - Mother and Child in an Orange Grove