A Sestina

My daughter laughs, bubbles of music rising
from sunlit smile, impossible to smother.
Held in her tiny fist, a stick of rowan
becomes rattan, she slashes at a hundred
imagined foes. The leaves above her tremble
in the spring breeze, urging her on, and dreaming.

A cloud rolls by, dark on that same breeze, dreaming
of its own glory, now. A chill is rising
that causes every mother’s heart to tremble.
My girl is lit from within. Who would smother
my daring knight’s dream? Surely not a hundred
chivalrous men who don’t believe in rowan.

In spring, white flowers crown our lovely rowan,
in summer, berries drip like blood, but dreaming
in the fall’s chill, bracing then for a hundred
days of cold, red leaves like hot flames come rising
up to the sky, like rage she cannot smother.
I see my sweet, happy girl, and I tremble.

My girl believes she’ll be a knight. Oh, tremble
you who’ll be there when she learns that Sir Rowan
is not from here. Nor any sir whose mother
bore a brave girl, who grew on knightly dreaming,
won chain, and belt, and spurs. Their legends rising
are fairy tales from miles away - five hundred.

But as the rustling of the leaves a hundred
feet above drowns out speech, and makes limbs tremble,
so will the prowess of a hundred rising
girls, overlooked no more, with swords like rowan,
proclaim their worth. For in the end, their dreaming
is worth no less than yours, not yours to smother.

For you can teach a girl, or you can smother
her sunlit smile, like greedy clouds a hundred
miles above. Other lands know it’s not dreaming
to think of foes defeated, others trembling
at a white belt on a woman with rowan
strength in her bones. We are already rising.

Smother excuses, you bold knights. Don’t tremble!
For I have walked five hundred miles with Rowan
in my heart, dreaming of Atlantia rising.