Poetry: Four Benot the Sixth – A Lyric on Seasons by Gemma Pink

Gold became ice
A sickly crackling metamorphosis
A false beauty of promise
Made fierce and unable
By the bite of the furnaced

A mystic creature
Long since escaping the realm
Of comprehension
Of wonder, striped chocolate
On a pillow now undone

Captured and bottled
Surfacing eternal youth of the many
Just beyond the grasp
A thousand cries and wails wait
For the piling years of the approaching past

℘

Glitter and heat
Shiny, forceful and seizing, dragging
Settling deep inside bones
The weight of moon and pull of sun
Stumbling through the gates of home

The creature bites
Unrelenting fangs of pinpoints in a blanket
Stretched across the sky
Light peeks through in an ancient dance
Only to tug at the flight of the mind

What a pencil paints
Cannot be undone; it rests hidden til
Gathered from the red shredded floor
And unbent unraveled until
The painting is criticized once more

℘

Goddess of earth creates
Fire and stone splashed like blood across trees
Only to fall from their grace
In a sea of sparking sounds
Fire crackling to take underfoot from safe

Prowls and lingers
Creature guards stolen warmth from a breeze
Swept up pushed on
As the sky draws the eyes once more
Searching black caws for the neck of a swan

The prison bars
Veiled behind ink and signatures of reason
Ashamedly undaunted
By hallways of torture, shrill bells
Instilling in youth the forever haunted

℘

Soft yellow rain
Cold November forgotten, as promised
Birth and slush of dark gray faded
A bright flicker of hope
The returning knife underestimated

Lilies and hidden delights
Uncovered treasure from once degradation
Fever sickness or cure
Restless, wasting, watching spindly hands tock
Breezing past once dreams so pure

Carved pathways
Dappled with colour and cream remembered
Once elegant brash beauty
Unto is delivered a treacherous glint
Of all sadistic promising plea

℘

Four benot the Sixth
Though clear devious waters it reflects
What missing two memories
Hath thy dire to forget and waste to shadows
Each waits to reclaim reign of eternal melodies

℘

About the Author: Gemma Pink, a MHS student, is the winner of the Manchester District Library’s first Spring Poetry Contest. Gemma has this to say about the poem:

“The contest was presented to us through our English classes, and I write a lot of poems so I submitted my most recent one at the time.

The poem, titled “Four Benot the Sixth”, is organized into 5 sections. Each section, omitting the last, follows the seasons starting with winter, then proceeding to summer, fall, then spring. The last stanza toys with the idea of having six seasons, two being forgotten in the sands of time.

Within each of the seasons is a three stanza segment, the first using the season as a visual representation of the emotional connections and feelings it instills. The second stanza in each compares the season to the creature of time it represents in a sort of reverse personification. The third stanza is using the season as a metaphor for educational institutions and touches on school and the relating emotions evoked during each season spent there.

I wrote this poem after being inspired by the freezing cold and the icicles outside my window, [something] that’s very new to me, being a southerner. My fascination with the icicles and my yearning memory for the warmth of Texas were the driving points behind the poem.”

by Fritz Swanson

Fritz Swanson has written for The Believer, the Christian Science Monitor, Print Magazine, McSweeney's, Esopus, LSA Magazine, and The Mid-American Review. He serves as a trustee on the Manchester District Library Board. He's the designer and publisher of The Manchester Mirror.

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