RATTLE is a poetry journal that emails poetry each morning, including a weekly response to a current event. Today, I received a form poem that made me sit up and feel. What follows is the mother’s explanation of where her words were birthed and a link to the poem.

Where there is pain, the remedy follows:
wherever the lowlands are, the water goes.
If you want the water of mercy, make yourself low …
—Rumi, "The Mathnawi"

Selene Frost: “I’m a general surgeon taking call at a rural Alabama hospital overrun with Covid patients. This sestina is in response to a particular instance when I travelled 2 hours in the middle of the night to help perform some procedures that were beyond the scope of practice of the heroes trying to keep this ICU afloat. The human cost of this pandemic is incredible. It’s not just about the vulnerable. Half the people dying in that room were in their 40s and 50s. None were vaccinated.” 

Follow the link to read the poem: “Midnight in the Covid ICU in Rural Alabama” by Selene Frost.

This poetic form (the sestina) is challenging and constrained enough that, if completed, it is nearly always a success, as many of my students proved to me. When we studied poetry, they were required to write a form poem, one following a specific pattern of syllables, rhythm, rhyme, and/or repetition. They most often chose a simple form, such as terza rima, but the rare student who wrote a sestina astonished me every time.

Explanation of the sestina from Poets.org:

“The sestina is a complex, thirty-nine-line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end-words in six stanzas and an envoi.

Rules of the Sestina Form

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

The envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines. In place of a rhyme scheme, the sestina relies on end-word repetition to effect a sort of rhyme.”

The sestina is difficult, but it is also powerful, providing both constraint and structure. When the poetic impulse is similarly powerful, the result is a work of both passion and command. Daughters missing their mothers, ballplayers missing the game, betrayal and grief and simple exuberance find a house to abide.