A
sestina is a poetry form comprising six stanzas of
six lines and a final triplet. All stanzas have the same six words at the
line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern. All six words
appear in the closing three-line envoi.
The six words in this
poem are: grassroots, billionaires, our, wages, street, debt.
##
Bernie Sanders Sestina
(in the voice of Bernie, words are mine)
was it worth a lifetime dedicated to
grassroots
ideals, while one percent of our wealth
lies in billionaires’
hands? I’m old, you’re young, it’s Our
Revolution, to speak up for higher
wages,
to call out the special interests, Wall
Street,
the cushy expungers who’ve left us in
debt.
it’s not to Congress, but to you I’m
indebted,
let’s take the grassroots
to the White House, take our voices into
the streets,
hold onto what’s valuable save the
greed of billionaires,
max up the minimum wage,
declare health and education ours.
will it take the time Egyptians built
the pyramids for our
younger generation to pay off their
student debts?
can we expect wage slave owners to
automatically offer decent wages?
would a skyscraper bow down to its
landscape of grassroots?
could a pseudo-billionaire promise to
make us all billionaires?
will this highway to hell we’re on pave
over our hometown streets?
to comprehend our grave issues doesn’t
require street
smarts. Or a math degree to see the
tatters of our
economy. There’s been an uptick of
billionaires,
yet with heads barely above water, the
body politic now drowns in debt,
if we’d grab one end of a rope at the
grassroots,
we might buoy up our backsides with a
living wage.
corrupt leaders don’t believe that the
wages
of sin is death. They look at our powerful
words as bearing no street
value. Lavish lawn parties are their
idea of grassroots.
they believe in holding our
infrastructure, climate future &
immigrant children as bargaining tools, debts
that everyone in America will pay for,
except the billionaires.
the rich in compassion and action are
our spiritual billionaires,
but big business and big pharma won’t
pay their wages,
to look out for one another should be
our primary debt,
instead of chasing the empty dream of
easy street,
it’s not my America, or your America,
or their America, but our
America, that wouldn’t have happened
from the get-go without the grassroots.
might even billionaires soon awaken to
grassroots ideals? To realize equal
wages are for all our benefit? Banded
together, might we finally arise from
sewer depths of debt to solid street
level? Sound pretty good?
~ Cynthia Gallaher
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