Sestina for Sisyphus

(Written for IB English Literature Learner Portfolio: Endgame, The Castle of Crossed Destinies) 

each mockery of a morning signals the same labour

I strain my arms waging war against a familiar weight

only to yield again. I was condemned to this afterlife, 

and called foolish and hubristic by indignant gods

all because their lusts, for blood and women, were, for minutes,

staunched by the daring of my desires

I once stanched the restless pulses of my desires

and committed to a course of ceaseless labour

while edicts and diplomacy and congress filled my minutes

I watched as Zeus, for lust’s sake, shunned all such weight

so I bartered for water by thwarting the King of the Gods

gaining a river for the citadel and a new purpose for life 

Hubris extended his hand and I held on for my life 

 Zeus had damned me to a death just before my desires

could take flight, still on fledgling wings. I affronted the gods

once more, chaining that siphoner of souls, stopping the labour

of the gods of war and of the dead. Still I ponder over the weight

I lifted off the lengthened lives, of what they did within their new minutes

during my final free stint, I savoured my stolen minutes

wandering through cliffs and shores lush with life 

I ignored death—the future’s looming weight, 

the eternal abyss, the punishment for my desires

I lived as if on Olympus, lacking all need to labour

Forgetting the seething gaze and grinding teeth of the gods 

Alas, one could never escape the wrath of the gods

Now, in the underworld, my joy pales into minutes

against the eternity I am to spend in futile labour 

what unjust judges, these arbitrators over life! 

These gods who deem righteous only their own desires

and called mine rogue and reckless—an uneven moral weight

the boulder against my palms is a heavy weight

still, I bear its burden, knowing my victory over the gods

because I had spited them and fulfilled my desires

How foolish to believe they made torture of my minutes. 

in their nectar-drunken stupor of a worshipped life

they forget that to be mortal is itself an incessant labour 

I have, for too long, foregone my desires in favour of the dead weight

of the lies promised through labour. the pain of your punishment, o gods, 

pales against that of any minute spent in the millstone of life 

Author’s Note:

A sestina is this form: https://poets.org/glossary/sestina