A Sestina is a French form consisting of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy. The final words of each line repeat in a different but predetermined sequence in each stanza.
Hunter, forged from pools of hellfire, carrying your quiver.
Wood and grass and water land and fall at your feet
As you pass through the valley. Tonight, the snow falls red.
The doe lifts her head as you step further into the trees
With black eyes she studies you: she knows not what you kill,
Nor for whom. But she is not whom you seek; this, she understands.
This Winter air, it snaps at your hands. I do not quite understand:
Why do you carry the burden of your quiver?
When you are sent into the mountains, your job to kill,
What do you think, when the body lands atop your feet?
Do you leave it be? The body, a warm gift for the cold trees.
Or do you stop and look at your hands, like the land, stained red.
There is a heart in your pocket, one in your chest. They are both red.
Hunter, your heart: it aches, human, just like mine— do you understand?
It aches with the snap of your bow and cries alongside that final scream in the trees.
For one’s final show of life to be a beg for more time— how cruel, your quiver.
Such an undignified performance, the final bow delivered at your bloodied feet.
Your heart, Hunter, will continue to ache— impossible to still— with every kill.
I heard my heart’s crazed attacks against my chest that night I was killed.
All through the forest it attacked; though now, it but stains your pockets red.
My heart, reduced to something to be grabbed when I crumbled at your feet.
Hunter, I beg of you, please: for whom do you kill? I do not understand.
For what I had to die, for what I was at the mercy of your sick quiver.
I did not want it to end. I did not want to die alone with the trees.
The doe, she approaches my body. I am cold now, resting with the trees.
Snout touches snow, a question. For she finds it curious, this lonely kill.
But it is not her that lies in snow, she rejoices. The wind strengthens, bushes quiver.
The snow is falling hard now. A spilled basin, white rids the scene of red.
Blanketed, I will rest until memory is no longer— I understand.
A man passes from above. He knows not where I lay. On my chest, feet.
The sun passes and I intertwine with Earth. I remember not the sight of feet
When I crumpled, my chest emptied. All I think of now is that the trees
Will grow brighter next Spring. Though I wonder, the reason why, will they understand?
The doe will stumble back to where I lay, searching for the greens that blossom from kill.
She will eat at the grass, at the flowers that rise from where my blood once pooled red.
And when she is full, she will leave. Alone again, I will lay still as the leaves quiver.
The day you stop your hunt, the day you understand how it feels to bow at the feet
Of death, I hope it sees you quiver as I did, emptied and discarded amongst the trees.
And I pray that the day you are killed, there is nothing in the sky to wash the stains on your hands. Red.
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