Mark A. Fisher
evolution
it is dawning coming rays of the Sun
filling the cave with morning light
spilling over the distant horizon
fading out the shifting stars
rousing people from naïve dreams
for another day of their life
they wander landscapes filled with life
watch the water reflect the Sun
whisper myths they found in dreams
of how each day comes the light
and all the meaning they could find in stars
and what might be beyond the horizon
until they look beyond the horizon
into cities that bustle with a different life
no more they wander beneath the stars
and come to worship a god of the Sun
and fill up the night with their own light
where they become someone else’s dreams
as they learn they turn to new dreams
and push against their new horizon
to long to understand what is light
and from where came all of life
to what it is that fuels the Sun
are there others among the stars
finally taking a tentative step out into the stars
the culmination of years of dreams
to travel far beyond the Sun
only to learn there was another horizon
and not enough time in life
unable to exceed the speed of light
transferring hope into something faster than light
so they could reach out into the many stars
and spread out their kind of life
somewhere sometime in someone’s dreams
past beyond the wormhole horizon
to stand on a world ‘round some distant Sun
wondering at the light of a new Sun
looking up at different stars on the horizon
building a new life and finding other dreams
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Mark A. Fisher is a writer, poet, and playwright living in Tehachapi, CA. His poetry has appeared in: Reliquiae, Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and many other places. His first chapbook, drifter, is available from Amazon. His poem “there are fossils” (originally published in Silver Blade) came in second in the 2020 Dwarf Stars Speculative Poetry Competition. His plays have appeared on California stages in Pine Mountain Club, Tehachapi, Bakersfield, and Hayward. His play “Moon Rabbit” won Audience Favorite at the Stillwater Oklahoma Short Play Festival in 2023. He has also won cooking ribbons at the Kern County Fair.
Backstory: “I find the sestina to be a difficult form to write. So I challenge myself once in a while to try writing one. I picked out some words (the 6 repeating ones) then looking them over I felt that the sci-fi theme of cultural evolution fit well with those words. Then it was a matter of pulling together “stages” in that evolution to be the stanzas of the poem. Finally working to “link” the stanzas with the repeated end words to try to maintain the flow of the story.”
Editor’s Notes/Image Citation: Image Credit: Abstract wormhole (fszalai from Pixabay).
Sestinas are ideally suited for narrative poetry. Their complex structures can easily be demystified by the following process I developed (I imagine others might have preceded me with a similar technique… but I haven’t seen it). In April 2024, I wrote my first sestina but had to simplify the understanding of its structure so I wouldn’t be distracted from the narrative while engaging the left-brain too much/following some template or more complicated instruction. I did it for me, but now I can share it with you.
Link to the Sestina
Refer to the sketch: Let A through F represent the end words of the six lines in the first stanza. To get the sequence in the next stanza, retrieve letter-pairs going from right-to-left from outside to the inside in succession. Repeat the process until done (if you tried to write a seventh stanza, you’d get the same sequence you started with). The 3-line envoi uses all six of the words and the order of use can vary but usually takes the order of the in the 6th stanza and transposes them (picture is worth many words).
