a poem for a poet Gianna of the Yellow Jacket Press

SONGSTER BREEZE

(In rhymed iambic hexameter, a sestina for Gianna)

The air was soft that moved so slightly palms.

The thought was light that spurred a song of psalms.

The sun was bright that warmed so soon the sands.

The muse that sang then drew to mind the bands

That seemed to play as softly as the breeze

And made us start to shift as by degrees.

Our minds were gifted there to some degrees,

So under shady leaves of dulcet palms

Whose branches played and splayed beneath the breeze,

We heard the muses singing such sweet psalms

That we became in swift, concerted bands

The dancers gliding over warming sands.

And on those hot and deep and shifting sands

The temperature of which soon climbed degrees

As if to claim the heights of heated bands,

We danced beneath the canopy of palms

And sang the songs to us that were like psalms

Inside the sweet and cloying summer breeze.

It rose, it did, that ever-blowing breeze;

It picked the grains, it kicked the heated sands

And seemed to grab from breath our breathless psalms

That moaned from lips quite parched, and by degrees

That shadow strutted, under fronded palms

In febrile quiver, dancing with the bands.

And then it was that we became the bands

And held our sway under the ample breeze

Beneath the ever-swaying, scented palms

Over the burning grains of all those sands;

And so by effort we sure claimed degrees

That gifted minds like ours with Beauty’s psalms.

Thus Beauty gave us all her gifted psalms

As if the chosen muse had called our bands.

And we became angelic, bound degrees

Of bronzed young gods in thrall to summer breeze

That tossed and drove the blistering golden sands

Beside the waters near the arching palms.

We sang the psalms and so we blessed the palms

Whose fronds from bands of heat so saved the sands,

And we, by mused degrees, became the lofting breeze.

Gianna Russo was very young when I met her and became part of the Tampa Bay Poets.  Everyone in the group dedicated himself or herself to poetry.  We met weekly, shared poems, discussed and critiqued one another's work.  Once a month we would give public readings, usually at the Greenwich Village Cafe, which was a home turned into a restaurant.  Gianna loves the Tampa Bay area as much as she loves poetry, and was determined to stay there and make her mark.  She did so, as teacher and poet and mother, but her crowning achievement was establishing the Yellow Jacket Press, which has a reputation as a sponsor of good poetry and as an aid to poets and poetry.  Each year it publishes a chapbook of a Florida poet's work; the poet must submit the work (see The Yellow Jacket Press for submission guidelines) and win the submission contest. I have entered but never won.  Gianna wrote a sestina  about me and it was amazing; many years later for her I wrote this one about writing poetry in Tampa.

(A sestina is a highly structured poem consisting of 6 six-line stanzas followed by a tercet [envoy or tornada], for a total of 39 lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time; if we number the first stanza's lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza's lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531. This organization is referred to as retrogradatio cruciata ["retrograde cross"]. These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet's first line usually containing 6 and 2, its second 1 and 4, and its third 5 and 3. English sestinas are traditionally written in iambic pentameter or another decasyllabic meter.) --Wikipedia