Reflections on a Hugging Sestina

Photo by @MichelleEvansArt

By André Duvall

[Note from Moristotle: When I asked André to please read and comment on a sestina I had written, his response was so thoughtful I asked him for permission to share his response publicly. The sestina appeared yesterday. I wrote it in September of last year, the same month André wrote his reflections, and I presented it to Dennis & Jan Huggins in October.]

I wanted to wait to comment on your sestina until after I had time to re-read it slowly and savor it. I do believe it “approaches perfection,” as you yourself felt. What a wonderful tribute to your friends – I feel the poem is successful on many levels:

Romance of the Huggins, in Sestina

Together
they worked,
raised family,
gardened,
walked,
befriended....

By Moristotle

In gratitude to my neighbors and friends Dennis Huggins and his wife, Jan (née Mayberry) Huggins, for a handsome house-number sign they had made for my wife and me, I composed this sestina in September last year and presented it to them in recitation and by framed printed copy. The Huggins kindly gave me permission to post the sestina here.

It was of course his fam’ly, Dennis’s,

that gave his wife her surname. And so, Jan,

for better (not worse), is ‘Huggins’ in life.

Together they raised family, kept house,

retired together to almost daily walks

with their Betty Lou, who joined them in their garden.

Their hands together worked: In the garden

digging, hoeing, raking, tilling, Dennis

maybe more the heavy stuff. On their walks,

either’s hand holds leash of Betty Lou. Jan’s

hands may be the ones do most inside the house,

as they did with children too – such is life.