Not even willing to recall yesterday,
every mind strains to remember a bland moment,
when forced to cope with times now stuck,
the morrow would not let it slip away,
and all modest times dismissed and meant to forget,
for ask me at bed time what has happened in the morning.
haunting me is one long-ago morning,
oh! if it had remained yesterday,
chest heaving, eyes watering, I vowed to forget,
I’d overdone what was nothing, but for me it was the moment
yet it always comes back, before it’s swept away,
however far I run, my path loops back, still stuck.
prejudiced memory stirs what should stay stuck,
no matter time, space, change, it stays that morning,
do me a favor and let me put it away
since there’s no will to remember yesterday.
a mere song an object, brings tears to this moment,
I almost believe it is embellished and all beneath to forget.
we cannot control our minds as dreams we might forget,
when it wills to remember, it is unbudgingly stuck,
a glance, a gesture, and 3 years ago moment,
troubles the peace for thousands of a morning!
I wonder who thought this a blessing yesterday?
faster to recall a tragic story, than what was for dinner just a day away.
Sometimes I feel my strength slipping away,
eaten by thoughts unwilling to forget.
although the moments dear aren’t just “yesterday”,
empowered and euphoric I become once I’m stuck
a battery for to fill I need each morning,
it is as is, so I am human to this moment.
did I not know life was brief bittersweet a moment,
I told myself “after all, life is just before we pass away.”
“why did I write of this?” I ask each morning,
it’s because I’m confused and don’t forget
the phrasing is not right, for I am not stuck!
it is natural, I should say, to forget you, Yesterday.
Every yesterday, each fragile moment,
I gather what returns each morning, though I try to forget,
before even what feels stuck finally drifts away.
Poetry
Stuck
Editor's Note
Teresa's poem is masterpiece on multiple levels, including the level of craft. This poem is a "sestina." A sestina is one of the oldest and most demanding of the fixed verse forms, invented by the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel in the twelfth century and carried into English by way of Dante and Petrarch, who prized its difficulty. It is built not on rhyme but on the repetition of whole words. The poem runs to thirty-nine lines: six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a short three-line stanza called the envoi (or tornada).
The engine of the form is its six end-words. You choose six words to end the lines of the first stanza, and thereafter you are not permitted to choose again — those same six words must end every line of every stanza, only in a new order each time. The order is not arbitrary; it follows a fixed spiralling pattern. If we number the first stanza's end-words 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, then the second stanza must take them in the order 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3. The same operation is then applied to each succeeding stanza — always taking the words from the bottom and top of the previous stanza alternately and winding inward. The pattern runs:
Stanza 1 — 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2 — 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3 — 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4 — 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5 — 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6 — 2 4 6 5 3 1
The envoi then gathers all six words into three lines, conventionally placing one word in the middle of each line and one at the end, so that the poem closes by sounding every one of its six notes a final time.
What matters for you as a writer is that the power of your poem is not in the arithmetic, but what the arithmetic does. Because the same six words keep returning, the sestina becomes a poem about obsession — about a mind that cannot leave a thing alone and must approach it again and again from different angles. The form does not merely permit circling; it enforces it. This is why the sestina has so often been chosen for grief, memory, longing, and unfinished business: the structure itself behaves like a thought one cannot put down. The skill the form teaches is how to make a word mean something slightly different each time it returns — how "morning" can be a time of day, then a burden, then a renewal — so that repetition becomes development rather than mere recurrence.
— William Rubel, Editor
