So while I've had some time off, I've also gotten back into writing regularly. However, I must admit that this particular poem is almost a decade old as I actually wrote it in 2006 for a workshop. This was my first attempt at a sestina, which is a rather fun form to play around with, and is especially good for fighting writers block.
The definition of a sestina is as follows:
It is a poem of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy, originally without rhyme, in which each stanza repeats the end words of the lines of the first stanza, but in different order, the envoy using the six words again, three in the middle of the lines and three at the end. (As stated on Dictionary.com)
Feedback is welcomed!
Secrets of Goldfish
by Alicia Young
A glint of orange had caught her eye,
The moldy white scales of a dead goldfish,
She stepped over it as she walked down the street.
There it lay, slain in the wide black river,
She forgot all about it when she turned the corner.
It was then that goldfish had called out her name.
Her heels clicked “ignore it,” when the girl heard her name,
Yet her reflection was fixed in its eye.
Her image was trapped in the view of the goldfish,
As her pace quickened slightly down a now longer street.
Why would a fish be so far from the river?
This thought remained buried away in the corner,
Of her mind, it was dusty, that small blackened corner,
In a place where even she questioned her name.
Were the answers she sought merely contained in this eye,
Of a storm now provoked by small, rotting goldfish?
“No,” she said quick, “I have been down this street,”
“These thoughts will wash away with the river,
of sleep. They’ll be gone, for I trust the river.”
But thoughts often find their way back from the corner,
They twist out and in and whisper a name,
Of someone who’s image is burned in her eye.
These memories are scattered, much like startled goldfish,
When she walks past that house at the end of her street.
Then she thinks of the boy, in the house, on the street,
And the way the air felt when the lights searched the river,
How she had watched, in the back, from a corner,
As city officials yelled out his name.
She watched as his mother covered her eye,
and heard her moan gargles like that of a goldfish.
In her eye, she had seen him, floating limp like a goldfish,
from a corner the lights flickered his name through the street.
When a mother’s scream shattered the ice ridden river.
© 2015 Alicia Young, All Rights Reserved.
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