On Laura L. Barkat's T. S. Poetry Press, which posts poems on a daily basis, July is sestina month, and they are kicking it off with David Lehman's sestina "Operation Memory." Click here and thou shalt see! Other sestina-makers such as the redoubtable James Cummins will also have their work featured. Here Here (or hear, hear!) is the opening stanza of Lehman's sestina (which he wrote on his birthday in 1986 and which is the title poem of his 1990 book):
<<
We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.
>>
Read on, read on, Voltaire, Rousseau!
