What follows is my first completed product of this vow.
This poem began with a few lines rolling through my mind, as my poems often do. The problem was that nothing further developed, so I decided to help it along by writing to form; hence, the sestina. By conforming to a particular pattern, I forced myself to extend my thinking. At least I am writing.
GENTLY DOES THE NIGHT
Gently does the night go into day
Like lovers parting lips and giving way
To old familiar, tender pleasures.
Then boldly rising, Sun thrusts the moon
Careless from his bed into a weary world
Where nightime treasures end,
As all soft loving dreams will end
When shown beneath the harsher light of day.
The risen sun looks down on this cold world
And calls us forth to go about our way
And busy our time with no thought of the moon
Or other of those softer natural pleasures.
Our days we fill with things that pass for pleasures --
Getting, spending, working with no end
Until the shly shining rising of the moon
Parts herself again to gentle out the day;
We live our lives of busyness this way,
Worn out and wearied in a wondrous world.
Our artificial, busy, concrete solid world
We fill with artificial, solid, concrete pleasures --
While harshened, hardened hearts along the way
Pull us only to a solid, hardened end,
Baking us with fire and heat like day
Solidifies his hold on earth and blurs the moon
Until the moon herself forgets she's Moon
And is subsumed into the brighter world
And blotted out by day.
Were there not times when natural pleasures
Triumphed in the end?
Were we not made to live another way?
The night herself can light a better way
If we would pause in wonder at a moon
That shines past concrete to the end
Of this harshened, heavy-hearted world
Devoid of pleaures.
The gentle light of night can blot the day
And put an end to life's unnatural way,
But only if each day we choose the moon's
Sweet sleepy treasure over a concrete world devoid of pleasure.
