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Sestina No. 1: We Come Upon a Time
©2018, Olan L. Smith
We come upon a time of ignorance
Of undocile cognitive dissonance
Where more conflicts come to core beliefs
And are held within the minds of all men
And women at once, up every shore
Comes dishonor and this rattles truth of mind.
Who upon this Earth does listen to the mind
Of a fool? Is it a mental ignorance?
Destroy, wash away the hope from every shore,
Our nation's ruin is within, our dissonance,
Our troubles revisited, raise women against men
To a point we question our own beliefs,
Our enemies everywhere. Who attacks our beliefs?
Are zero's and one's our enemy hidden in our mind,
Where people fight not with swords, but with words of men?
Destroy science, strike down education with ignorance,
Confound the mind with cognitive dissonance
And wash away all our freedom from our shore!
We walk with freedom of self, from shore-to-shore,
And our beliefs are our own. Despite beliefs
We are one, not tribes lost in our own blurred dissonance
With other cultures. We can be divided by mind
And brought to our knees; empty time can cause ignorance
When we don't read and repeat the prior mistakes of men
Who paid for them with blood and death of innocent men.
Now, the enemy is on your desktop, a new shore,
A front where knowledge is flexible, and promotes ignorance
Where are the truisms of my mother? Some beliefs
Are not worth dying over, hold what is true in your mind,
The gray areas for reasoning, and of native dissonance
Irons out wrinkles with harmony, conquer dissonance,
Listen for the harmony of words of women and men
From around the world. Find common areas of the mind,
And walk the shores to hear the waves crash. The shore
Breaks the waves, and the waves erode it. So it is with beliefs,
The waves of difference will erode our ignorance.
This battle is digital as it checks our new shore
Where the battle is to wrestle thoughts against beliefs
Held since upbringing, we are to cast off all ignorance.
A/N The structure of the sestina is:
First Stanza 1-2-3-4-5-6
Second Stanza 6-1-5-2-4-3
Third Stanza 3-6-4-1-2-5
Fourth Stanza 5-3-2-6-1-4
Fifth Stanza 4-5-1-3-6-2
Sixth Stanza 2-4-6-5-3-1
First line of Envoi 2-5
Second line of Envoi 4-3
Third line of Envoi 6-1
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(Photo by: Olan L. Smith, all rights reserved)
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Poems from the Quill, by Olan L. Smith
Poetry"Poems from the Quill" is where I place current works that don't fall into other collections. It is here you will find obscure poems that range from constraint to free-verse. I began this collection as a contest entry, years ago, for what was then t...
