Sanctuary, another sestina

We were given an activity to do as part of a course I’m taking, which is way more fun than a 20-credit masters-level research methods course ought to be. The course is full of very interesting researchers doing very interesting things in very interesting ways. I don’t quite buy all of the various ideas I’m coming across but I am buying the creativity and imagination.

Hopefully, it’s OK to share another poem with you, triggered by my response to this week’s activity.

The prompt and task

our understanding of the world is deeply rooted in our physical encounters with it. Image created by hotpot.ai

Research Prompt

What does embodiment mean - or feel like - for you?

Task

“show and tell” bring in a photo, poem or item and an accompanying caption.

My response

I wasn’t sure I had much to say about this, so I turned to my equivalent of Google, which is an AI search agent. I asked it, “what does ‘embodiment’ mean in social science”, which returned quite a lot of stuff, including, “our understanding of the world is deeply rooted in our physical encounters with it”. I fed these words into an AI image generator.

I took six words from the image and the context: light, body, forest, space, mountains and sanctuary. From these, I made a sestina (see De Andrade, 2022, chap. 3, and this post for more about sestinas).

Sanctuary

Coming home in the evening light,
each step racking the body,
lungs filled with fragrant forest.
Entering a sacred space
high within the mountains,
seeking sanctuary;

safe, certain sanctuary
of warmth and peace and light.
Within our minds are mountains 
not seen upon the body 
yet real in time and space 
as trees that form a forest.

Oh, to be in the forest 
that emerald watery sanctuary
of susurrating space
and scintillating light
that satiates the body.
What, then, of the mountains?

The gorges and mountains
and impenetrable forest 
of the mind within this body?
From them, what sanctuary?
We that seek the light
must find ourselves a space,

that solitary, silent space
made beneath the mountains
bathed in inner light
sweet and fresh like a forest.
To find celestial sanctuary 
far from the cloying body 

that suffocating body
in another space 
that final, perfect sanctuary 
free from cold, hard mountains 
and unforgiving forest. 
Living, loving light.

In the sanctuary of my body
I yearn for light and space
between the mountains and the forest.

References

De Andrade, Marisa. 2022. Public Health, Humanities and Magical Realism. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003196488.