Ian Hayles started a discussion about the Sestina form. Thought I would give it a go...was a little bit of a headache because I just picked the six words at random - book, fooling, apple, mouth, chair and tower - before I had my idea but see what you think folks...

 

 

Reading

 

From the echo, declared the book:

“My fruits are never fooling,

dangling words, a tease of apple -

the visitor bends in the mouth,

ripe mindful spines clamber a chair

and make your posture, a learning tower.”

 

The eye dictates the shadowed tower

from the angle of the opened book,

and leans into with an empty chair,

whose vacancy is what is fooling

the rush of lack of head by mouth,

seeing knowledge, a bitten apple.

 

But if you took the whole apple,

stalk and skin and seed and made a tower;

the start and end from there to mouth,

the pages sewed into the book,

would illuminate the sitters fooling

their attendance, sleeping in a chair.

 

For the connection is the body with the chair,

not a mind fed on a proffered apple,

but the comfort that the frame is fooling

by building the back up like a tower,

and on the lap, a lonely book,

and a head titling forward and a gaping mouth.

 

When the word shapes the mouth,

the cavern becomes a chair

and words look forward from the book

to tell you of the tasty apple

that  gave us wisdom of a tower,

knocked down by our hurry and our fooling.

 

Hastily read, you are fooling

the need to make wise your mouth

and set up high in an ivory tower

a throne that is made from a chair.

Here -the feast is the flavour of the apple

and not the core of the book.

 

The  tower, smart to fooling,

eats the book with its growing mouth

and upturns the chair by dropping apples.