Thank you to enigmatic_blue for hosting the party!
Author’s notes:
Eep! I’m an hour late — sorry!
This is my first attempt at writing a rhyming poem, specifically a “sestina,” and it kicked my ass. A lot. For those who want to know:
The sestina is a pentameter poem consisting of six stanzas of six lines plus a three-line coda (know as the envoy or envoi). The sestina “rhymes” on six end-words, which must be repeated in each stanza in a controlled order, whereby the last end-word in each stanza becomes the first end-word of the next stanza: abcdef, faebdc, cfdabe, ecbfad, deacfb, bdfeca. The envoi must employ two of the end-words in each of its three lines.
– Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry (p. 603)
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