April 6 2016
(Sestina, plus todays prompt “murk”)

 

 

She wrote, love poems, in curvy silver lines

To the beloved moon with a milky smile

In the murk of an unusually long night

He indulged in the sweet lyric silently

The tidal messages continued incessantly

A lover, so perfect; Lo! Behold her, the sea!

 

Wind crossed the smiling-path of the moon and sea

It tried to interpret the curvy silver lines

To the shore it sent them incessantly

All-knowing land witnessed with a smile

The land wept in its heart about its loveless life, silently

And the thick air it breathed, day and night

 

Heroic stories were sung by the birds of night

Which didn’t reach the ears of the sea

Autumn leaves in pilgrimage listened silently

On the forest ground, patterned in red- yellow lines

The songs were filled with tears and smiles

The stars sharpened their ears incessantly

 

The stories of golden days were sung incessantly

And the stories of fireflies of the yester-nights

Who filled the nights with phosphorous smiles

The wanton wind circumvented the land and sea

It tried to judge the songs of birds and silver lines

Up there, blinking stars wiped their tears silently

 

City lanes sang a different kind of song, silently

(New stories filled my weak chest incessantly)

“I was the mighty Ananthan Kaadu*” – a line

I heard so aloud throughout the gloomy nights

“Now they made me a concrete kaadu by the sea

And they polluted the ways to cry and smile”

 

“I forgot”, the city cried, “to hope and smile”,

“Filled dirt they in my stomach, sobbed I silently

The steams died before reaching the sea

Filth they heaped everywhere incessantly

No more singing, here, of the birds of night”

The sea still kept writing in curvy silver lines

 

Will ever the silver lines give a smile

In the songs of night, about the land, silently

I shall sing incessantly, like the ever-loving sea

 

*Ananthan Kaadu is the name of the forest which existed in the place of today’s Trivandrum city. Kaadu means forest.

Unedited poem, just tried to write a sestina, and I agree that I am exhausted at the end and left polishing it for another time.

 

A sestina is divided into six six-line stanzas, or sections, plus one final stanza of three lines. We’ll call the last word of the first line a, the last word of the second line b, etc. The order of these words in the first six stanzas is like this: abcdef faebdc cfdabe ecbfad deacfb bdfeca. In other words, the last word in Line 1 is also the last word in Line 8. The last word in Line 2 is also the last word in Line 10. Etc. The final stanza, or section of the poem has three lines. Each of these uses two of the words, one somewhere in the middle of the line and one at the end. The pattern of this section is: be dc fa.

 

Sarala