A Cyclical Life

Here in the heavy depths of insolent woes, We gesture and talk and waste our time, Staking claim to each minute of our earthly life, Running the hours through a clock by the day, Never sated, not content to find even love, Buried deep inside the petals of a perfect rose. So was a metaphor created from the rose, Then plagiarized and used for all of time, Simply here to represent the beauty of love, A perfection to which we cannot aspire to in life, Or even death, in the darkest of all those woes, Great though they may seem by the passing day. It's a fragile, soulful kind of love, In the pressing presence of the breaking day, Where your back breaks beneath ample woes, And there just simply isn’t ever enough time, To do what you plan to do with your life. Then you start to resemble that rose. Soft and delicate, with easy loss of life, Mournful of the passage of time, Counting down, day by dreary day, Ever seeking out to find dear love, The theoretical banishment of woes. Such is the way of the deep red rose. Has it ever occurred to us not to mark time? Just to ignore it, along with any such woes, Just to leap forth and enjoy life, To live to the absolute fullest everyday, And just as chosen by the poet's rose, To find and hold on to, that one true love. For I find, that it's mostly true these days, That people don't make enough time, For laughter and fullness in life, So preoccupied with petty woes, That they forget about the beauty of love, And in doing that, they forget about the rose, I know what the rose represents in my life, And I work hard to expel my woes every day, So that soon I will have time for true love. *****Written in Sestina for Constance's Poetry 101 contest.***** ******* 5th Place winner******* ******Sarah Blake August 2010****** A sestina is a highly structured form of poetry consisting of six six-line stanzas and a three- line envoy (thirty-nine lines). The end words of the first stanza are repeated in varied order as end words in the other stanzas and also recur in the envoy.