History Boys (A Sestina) Poem by James Mills

History Boys (A Sestina)

Rating: 5.0


Slick as a pair of fish we sidled out.
Away from Latin and its fiendish rules,
from the old Brother flicking his cane
at us when verbs and nouns, trapped
like frantic animals, tumbled from us
so wrong we thought that he would cry.

Away from school and the cry
of boys ligging about and acting out
last night’s TV; away – just the two of us,
from the chalk-stained ingrained rules
that held our classmates trapped
in a prison whose bars were made of cane.

Tomorrow, maybe, the sting of the cane
might force regret, even make us cry
but for now we found ourselves un-trapped,
abroad in an un-mastered world. Out -
where we could make our own rules,
hope that, somehow, they might make us.

We had no clue where the road might take us,
too young as yet for raising Cain
or testing truths in Life’s book of rules.
Sun shone and amidst the Autumn cry
of crows we were bound to find out
that, even in freedom, we were trapped.

Not as a fowl or a fox is trapped,
they had more wit than us –
might chew through a paw to get out,
nor as old farmers hiding wheat to save cain
when landlords tumbled hovels in a hue and cry,
back when it seemed only the poor broke rules.

No. We had no idea of the rules
that would always hold us trapped,
marked to the bone, like Cain.
Breeding, land and lore would hold us,
looking inward, wanting out,
far, far from the banshees cry.

What’s freedom but a rousing cry against another’s rules,
the finding out, the getting out, of the trapped,
and that, for all of us, morning will bring the cane.
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