“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” ― Jane Austen

The sestina is a complex, thirty-nine-line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end-words in six stanzas and an envoi. The envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines - Although the form is arbitrary its enforced lexical repetition is an additional technique to rhythm and rhyme that keep’s the imagery of the idea within the poem alive and more interesting ( hopefully ) to the reader - let me know what you think .

This site has more information on the sestina form

My dead father rests in cliched peace,
that in single life escaped him, most of the time.
Ashes now, but I imagine his sleep
to be good, like a man found not guilty in a trial.
He left me a large aspidistra pot,
stuffed full of poems, on each an avian mark.


Chipped, it also bears scratches and a mark
I recall from youth, five letters spelling peace,
initials too, (Peter and Olivia Thompson), ‘Peace POT.’
Two poor writers, with little sense of time,
artists of their present, but blind to future’s trial,
where one endures, the other silenced in sleep.


After mother died, I watched father in his sleep
with a tear stained face, and sensed the mark
of Caine upon his soul. On trial,
not knowing if he would find a peace,
his flesh in limbo, stuck for all time,
slow braised in hellish casserole pot.


Words, like fragile shoots from a flower pot,
grew slowly, and brought comfort to his sleep.
Pantoums, sestinas and sonnets beat time,
conducted by his pen to indelibly mark
each poem with a white dove, of peace,
an avian army of advocates that argued at his trial


and won. I know now why each poem and all the trial
attempts, he threw into that pot,
as if he knew would grow a protective kind of peace,
that prepared me for the nightmares of my sleep.
Writer warrior, his sword but a pen, to make his mark,
and create a memory of her time.


With each precious poem I read, over time,
I feel closer to one I never could trial,
a mother, whose breast my milk teeth couldn’t mark,
who now, in poetry preserved would never go to pot.
How I relish those times, whilst in my sleep,
Dad wrote of Mother's strokes throughout my slumbered peace.


When my time has come for blissful peace,
and I begin my trial of eternal sleep,
don't grieve, just mark me, please, with a poem in your pot.