---
title: "Sestina"
date: "2007-05-31T11:49:46+01:00"
modified: "2007-05-31T11:49:46+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/sestina/"
post_id: 4201
---

# Sestina

(for D.S.) I am writing this down on a late June evening  
 In the future we talked about.  
 It’s midsummer,  
 Now as then, the air humid, the roof – and treetop colours  
 The same to-night as they were before, untouched  
 By any change time might have projected. The moment  
 Feels the same as when we both stepped out to the terrace  
 For air, fifty years back, to look in from that terrace  
 At our past deliberately. This present evening  
 Is halted by my sudden recall of the moment:  
 Saunders closes the glass door on our Midsummer  
 Party, and the dancing, and we both stand there untouched  
 By time… I know it all as I did then, the colours,  
 The lamps, the music – then coldly the colours  
 Of another world waiting beyond the terrace  
 Den and I were balanced on, a place still untouched  
 By our youthful energies! That those evening  
 Sounds of seventy-eights on that midsummer  
 Night of our last week will end at that moment  
 We have not understood, it does not seem a moment  
 For growing much older in. We look at the colours  
 Back inside the room, of our endless midsummer,  
 And find them sufficient; from that redbrick terrace  
 They appear to reach out beyond our evening,  
 And claim all the farther darkness untouched  
 By their innocent radiance.  
 But it could not stay untouched  
 For long. There would come for each of us some moment  
 Which would alter everything in less than an evening,  
 And make another future. The dancing colours  
 Inside the room called us back, but the dusk of the terrace  
 Contained in fact a darkness that would cancel midsummer,  
 Forestalling our inheritance of any midsummer.  
 The future would command us – we who were untouched  
 By experience – to step out from that terrace  
 As onto a mountain ledge not long after that moment,  
 Even though the air felt gentle and the comforting colours  
 Back there in the room seemed immune  
 to the darkening evening.  
 Our midsummer turned dangerous at that moment.  
 Such seasons don’t stay untouched and preserve the same colours.  
 Our future was there on the terrace of that last evening