NaPoWriMo 11 ~ A Sestina

A big chunk of my Sunday surrendered itself to the following sestina. I wanted to attempt at least one during NaPoWriMo. Prime number 11 is a good day to post it. The first stanza was inspired by a television commercial with an ape walking through chest high water. It’s a commercial for an upcoming documentary, Born to be Wild. I have not seen the show. That image drove this sestina, and I devoted a great deal of time to incessant revision. :-) A sestina contains 6 six-line stanzas and a three-line envoi. The last word of each line in the first stanza is repeated in a specific order in subsequent stanzas. The last three lines, the envoi, contain those same 6 words in a specific order as well.

an under-towed sestina

Chest high in unrestrained current
an ape lumbers up televised rivers
advertising a world that slowly disappears
as humanity continually eliminates diversity
perpetuating only what we need to survive
like nothing else matters, but human agenda.

Detrimental to earth’s health, human agenda
hypes up missiles to counter Gaddafi’s media current.
It’s a miracle America continues to survive
as it flushes billions into war’s bloody rivers.
Applauding its melting pot diversity
individual dissension all but disappears.

But, bumblebees and buttercups disappear
from prairies and rivers and hives, honeying an agenda
of vanishing species— demolishing diversity.
We bring home baby bumblebees on currents
of memory and nursery rhyme rivers
where polar bears and honey bees always survive.

If obliteration continues, people might not survive.
Unintentional annihilation might make us disappear.
Building lives with commerce round rivers,
promoting a virtual pocketbook agenda,
distracting the masses from life’s dying current,
aggrandizing self, assholes like us eradicate diversity.

Bumper stickers read: celebrate diversity!
Darwin claims that the strong fish survive
while small scale genocides defeat empathy’s current.
Reddening capitalistic lenses, compassion disappears
and selfish serpents endorse their own agenda.
Progressing through canyons, they stifle life’s rivers.

The last of the humans will gather at rivers.
In themselves, they will recognize diversity.
Stories will rise as each voice creates agenda
yarning out what we need to survive
before every remaining creature disappears
into time capsule’s unopened current.

In the river, there swirls an island where honeybees survive.
An ape flounders in diversity of flow— towed under, it disappears.
A common agenda volts after the ape merging with humankind's current.


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Thank you to Writer's Island for providing a place to post every day this month, and always on Saturdays.