I spent an inordinate amount of time, yesterday evening (well, a couple of hours ago) laughing at my dear friend and tongue-brother* Tim Ralphs for being a luddite and not liking Twitter.
In fact, not only has Tim been a creative inspiration and performance role model to me for years now, he’s also a bloody brilliant friend, whether or not he can manage, one day, to squeeze his genius into 140 character bursts.
A while back he did an introduction at his night The Story Forge which, appropriately enough, really fired my imagination. Being more of a fan of the written (as opposed to spoken) word than Tim is, generally, I was delighted to discover that he’d written it down and used it on his website, so I could enjoy it again.
And nick it to make a sestina out of.
So, Tim, this one is for you.
He says “The tongue’s like a red headed match.
We strike it, “Ta-Dah-Dy” on the rough roof
Of the mouth and with that spark we light a flame.
And then? (he says) And then the lungs are bellows
And words melt in the crucible of the ear,
Cold-black, red-warm, white-hot and we forge dreams.”
It’s like a voice you’d hear within your dreams
Narrating unobtrusively. It match-
es
Your imagination. In your ear
It gently coos, like pigeons in the roof.
You hardly know it’s there and yet those bellows
Can fire imagination to a flame.
Sometimes I think his mind must be aflame
With inspiration. Every night his dreams
Must burgeon with mythology. The bellows
Of his lungs force out the words that light the match
Which lights up all our faces. And the roof
Is raised. He whispers jokes into your ear
Although he’s on the stage. It’s almost eer-
ie How his voice is like a flame
Which blooms, filling the room up to the roof
Immersing us in story. Oh, the dreams
We’ll dream tonight will be a perfect match
With what he speaks, declaims, murmurs and bellows.
His stories, when I hear them, pump the bellows
And fire my creativity. My ear
Takes in the passion, tempting me to match
It with my poetry, and yet his flame
Of genius, It taunts me in my dreams,
Escapes me, like a bat up in the roof.
The tongue strikes, “Ta-Dah-Dy” on the rough roof
Of the mouth. And then that flame, fanned by the bellows
Ignites: black-red-white-hot and forges dreams
Which creep, insouciant, into your ear
And set imagination all aflame.
My story-brother’s tongue: red-headed match.
He forges dreams which flap about the roof
Then strikes a match which, nurtured by the bellows,
Ignites my ear and sets my mind aflame.
* In no way as filthy as it sounds. Utterly innocent, in fact.
Tom Juniper Poetry 
Well, that just about makes a boy blush.
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Mission accomplished.
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That is a WOW sestina. What a pity the wordpress margins scrambled up your layout.
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Thanks, and I know, right? It took me an hour to get it to let me have spaces between the stanzas. I miss Blogger. It’s not as good, but it tries harder to please. I suspect that WordPress looks down on me. Have I overthought this?
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Sarah, I’m not sure how you are entering into WordPress. This works for me using Windows on a PC. If you are using a Mac, I have no idea.
I use Word for all my writing, then cut and paste it into WordPress. For the stuff other than the actual poem, I go to WordPress ‘Add new post’ and place it in ‘visual’ mode, click on the far right icon, ‘show/hide kitchen sink (alt+shift+Z).’ This exposes a second row of icons, including the ‘Paste from Word’ icon. For all my bland commentary other than the poem, I cut and paste directly into this ‘Paste from Word’ screen. WordPress insists on double-spacing every time you used the enter/return key, but the extra spaces can be deleted as needed.
For the poem, I cut and paste it from Word, into Notepad (a no-frills word-processing program included in Windows). Notepad can be found by clicking on the ‘Start’ button in the bottom left corner of your screen. It will either be visible on the popup menu or you can enter “Notepad” in the ‘Start search’ box and it will locate it. Cutting and pasting into Notepad effectively strips all formatting except for the enter/return double-spacing you want to be there. Once it looks the way you want it to, you cut and paste from Notepad directly into WordPress (don’t use the ‘Paste from Word’ option). This process, an extra step, I know, but it will keep the stanza spacing the way you made it. Other than the wrap-around of a long line, what you see is what you get.
Good luck and keep writing, you are one heck of a writer. Oh, and you can delete this rambling comment if you want, just don’t know how to explain it any shorter.
Mike
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Cheers. Yep, the only way I could get the stanza spacing WAS by pasting it all into notepad, which I tried in despair after nothing else worked!
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You have a neat “tongue brother.” What an amazingly descriptive analogy.
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You make the sestina look so easy… bravo to you! I love the images and word choice.
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The first stanza is all Tim. I just riffed on it.
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