Death Sestina
Clif Mason
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2023 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Traditional Verse
Don't write a sestina unless you mean it,
unless grief's garotte is cutting off the air
to your lungs, aiming a hollow-point bullet at your head;
unless the blood in your temples is slamming the word
Now against your brainpan's drum, & your eyes feel
they're about to pop & slop out like dropped eggs, unless
you smash in every secret's dead-bolted door, unless
nothing makes sense & nothing can—the fit
will not pass—until you will yourself to feel—
again? for the first time?—you are a creature of air,
& you will not be hawk-hooded by any words
except freedom from every blinder, until ahead
lies only the endless street of chances & choices, for head
or heart, hands or feet, a lane you'll ramble until & unless
you're dropped—stopped—by some happenstance word
or widow-making infarction of fickle time & space: It
jets the body's own morphine into your blood, shocks the air
around face & chest with the sheet lightning you feel
in every singed synapse & capillary, feel
from broken arches to the ends of every follicle on your head,
feel from the last dear lung-full of sullied air
to your tongue's final winged words—unless,
contrary to every expectation, you're reprieved, spared until it
pleases the gods of circumstance to reward you with the word
terminus—be it mortal end or end of mortality—or those words,
grave & grand: quietus, fate & fatality, though you feel
not one iota of fatalism, utter not one syllable of fear: It
is only then the heart will submit & the head
accept that this time there will be no word unless
to alter the arc of death's scimitar, to breathe air
into forsaken lungs, to fill eyes with light, air
with words one didn't think or know to say before, words
that are pure gift & grace. No, there will be no word unless
to arrest the descent of death's guillotine, no touch to feel,
no music to hear, no incense to smell, only the still head's
thoughts floating infinitely & eternally within, until it
is clear to all there will be no unless to fill lungs with air,
mind with thought: It is the instant of the last word
& the first, that you feel, as you felt, in heart & head.
