Sestina Day 41: Bouts Rimes

Prompted by NaPoWriMo, this is a Bouts Rimes on a Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop. Hers is quite a lot better. I love the last line especially.

It isn’t exactly a gingerbread house.
But it may as well be, and grandmother
Looks out of the window and waits for child
Just small enough to fit into her stove,
There’s a picture of her in the almanac,
So unflattering, it moves her to tears.

But really she knows she is wasting her tears
Most people know not to go near the house 
Having been warned away by the almanac,
Everyone knows what the fiendish grandmother.
Likes to capture and roast in her horrible stove.
But there’s always a chance she can lure in a child,

Because sometimes the forest delivers a child
Alone and confused, very often near tears
And she’ll usher them in to get warm by the stove,
And have cake and fresh milk in her nice little house.
She seems so much like the child’s very own grandmother
That quite soon they forget what it says in the almanac

Although all of the villagers do read the almanac
And horrible warnings are impressed on each child,
If they should fall prey to the old grandmother
They’ll be all gobbled up. Often they’ll be in tears.
Sure enough, they forget, soon as they see the house
They forget all the stories about the oldstove.

It’s a perfectly normal old cast iron stove.
There’s a picture of it in the old almanac.
Which means somebody must have escaped from the house
So maybe there’s hope for this terrified child
Who stumbles and trips through the forest in tears
Falling into the arms of the kind grandmother.

And she trustingly reaches up to grandmother
Who lifts her and carried her up to stove,
Crooning soft lullabies in her ear till the tears
Cease to fall. She’s so gentle. Maybe the almanac
Got it wrong. No, quite soon she’ll be eating the child
Off her best delftware plates in her gingerbread house.

No, the tears will not help you, Nor yet will the almanac.
Go with your grandmother up to the stove.
It’s too late for you, child, You will not leave this house.