sestinas & moons — noʻu revilla

What haunts you?

Who protects you?

How does protection manifest in your life?

Write about (or invent) a shapeshifting guardian who takes multiple forms. What are they protecting you from, and at what cost? Who protects them?

Every year, I return to a sestina by Brandy Nālani McDougall. In addition to being a generous leader in the literary community, Brandy is also a dedicated mentor, dear friend, and the outgoing Poet Laureate of Hawaiʻi. “Return to the Kula House” features in her first full-length collection Ka Makani Paʻakai / The Salt-Wind and it was my first teacher in the sestina form. “Moon” is one of the six end words that shift positions across stanzas as the poem builds. First, the moon serves as a guide to the speaker as she drives back to her childhood home. In its third appearance, the moon is an ally, and then becomes a warning in the middle of the night (“the cold moon” in a father’s voice). The recurring end words of a sestina refuse to be forgotten, but by virtue of their shapeshifting structure, they work toward change. Insistence is elemental to the sestina form, and that insistence creates urgency and music. I return to Brandy’s sestina not only for its story, but also for how it thinks. Here are the first three stanzas:

Return to the Kula House

Brandy Nālani McDougall

Night, and the road to Kula

is lit completely by the moon.

Driving, headlights off, I see shadows,

Blurred pastures lines in barbed wire.

I am trying not to remember

the old house, its glassless windows –

a kitchen knife through a window –

my mother and father in our Kula

house. I don’t want to remember,

but the face in this moon

has the same harsh, wiry

gaze. Walls lined with shadows,

bruised fists, for years, I shaded

them with unbroken windows

and fence-posts left unwired,

where our little house in Kula

overlooks all of Maui and the moon

could never ask me to remember.

Dear Brandy,

If the moon circles you, what do you keep circling? Two nights ago, we shared a bottle of red wine and talked about Haunani and the ways poetry has saved our lives. I recently wrote a poem called “After you swallow the moon” because I want to take the magic of our ancestors seriously. We are not here to make a spectacle of mana. We are consequential. We endure and create. I often return to your poems when my own voice feels thin. Today, I sought your many moons: moon as elder, protector, testimony, and archive. Moon and its haunting kin: mirrors, windows, knives. Each turn in your sestina opens a different door to the same grief. Maybe this is how we touch haunting without letting it devour us. Mahalo for reminding me that memory is like a circle, and a circle is still a path.

me ka naʻau haʻahaʻa,

Noʻu

setinas & moons

wet & let