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The poem “Mexican Sestina” by Geoffrey Smagacz read by the poet himself at the Society of Classical Poets online Poetry Symposium on June 28, 2025:
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Video created by Andrew Benson Brown.
I would like to assure you all that i am in relatively fine fettle and not, as of yet, lubbered…
Peter, your faith comes shining through in these precious gems. They are reasoned and inspiring.
Excellent comedy, indeed -- especially the thermometer, with its hilarious rhymes, and the irony of the Job Interview.
Russel, in addition to being a good poet, you are clearly a wonderful people-lover. What a great project you have…
"Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" makes a simple yet strong assertion of faith. There is no argument, just the confident statement,…
I spent a year in Celaya Guanajuato in the mid 1980s.. was given a home by the wonderful Nena and Dante of the Vencedora Cajeteria, was invited for breakfast with dear Padre Chevy and his kind housekeeper Cheuy for Friday breakfasts and for regular weekends with my friend Conchita and her wonderful family in Leon. It was a life-changing experience. In Mexicio I discovered what real family looks like, what it means to be a mother, what a Catholic community is, and what it takes to build one and to keep it alive, what the Rosary is and what it means to pray it..In other words I was given a providential opportunity to experience people really living the commandments to love God and neighbour and to trust not in our own strength, such as it is, but to His Providence.
Listening to your account left me deeply unsettled. In Mexico, despite the great psychological challenge of the dramatic culture shock which I experienced, I ultimately found genuine love .. i.e not of fame or power, pleasure or success .. but of God and of neighbour , peace and through this I found purpose and vocation. Yet you seem to have found nothing of the kind on your beach.
Part of the Mexican genius is hard work.
Here in the UK we think of Mexicans as lazy but that was not what I saw at all. I’ve never met so many so determined and hard-working people. Those whom I saw worked not for material gain but for the love of God and family ..
They were not lazy.. It was just that they paced themselves. A Siesta is supposed to be restorative.. to make the most of the time of day when you are too hot and exhausted because you’ve been up since dawn.. to work…to recharge… to enable to you better resume work in the evening.
Your account evokes in me an unsettling , suffocating and perturbing sensation ..
it has the opposite effect to a Siesta.. Rather like memories of visiting the London Dungeon in the 1970s…listening to it caused me to wander down a labyrinth of dark passages , past one ghastly exhibit after another, searching desperately for light, direction and meaning and finding none. It left me feeling paralysed in the dark.
I have recently discovered the word “acedia”. The desert fathers apparently called it the ” Noon-day devil” a feeling that nothing is worth while and you should sink into a half-life state and give up. I believe this to be the besetting temptation of the age.
I heartily recommend you wake up, get up off the beach, listen to C.S Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters”
.. Go and spend some time before the Blessed Sacrament and ask Him what He has plannned for your life
and what you should do.
I hope and pray you find the kind of purpose and joy I found in Mexico
and I saw in the often very poor but loving and hard-working Mexicans
with whom I was priviledged to spoend a year,
sincerely,
Karen in Cambridge,
UK
No one is trying to impugn the work ethic or spiritual values of the average Mexican citizen. Of course love and community exist, but the point is a simple one: that organized crime and institutional corruption drive record-setting homicide rates. According to the NY Times, more than 90% of crimes go unreported; of those 10% that are, less than 4% of the criminal investigations that result from that are ever solved.
Just to break this down, that means that of every 250 crimes committed, 249 are either unreported or reported but unsolved. That is sheer insanity.
Chat GPT was also unsettled by the idea behind this poem. It refused to create any images of gun-toting Mexican drug-dealers because it didn’t want to “perpetuate any false stereotypes” about Mexicans. So I went to an AI-generating program that was free of wacky leftist safeguards.
Dear Geoffrey,
Thank you. for the message..
.I quite understand that the situation is grim in Mexico and certainly do not think we should pretend otherwise.. what troubled me about this poem was that the protagonist seemed indifferent. It was like Camus’ L’etranger on the beach. the episode with the floating head.. there was no reaction.. just kept on sipping tequilas.. and I was missing any sense of hope. I am sure you have written and will probably write great poems but a genuinely great poem clearly recognises and distinguises dark from light, demonstrates and shares human emotions such as empathy and horror and always leaves the reader in a better place.
warmest regards,
Karen
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Karen, I live in Mexico! I love Mexico! And for all the reasons you mention: faith, family, and friends…and also pickleball. I love CS Lewis, my Catholic faith, and the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Lovely to hear from you…
and hope you can get hold of enough Lewis:)
Mind you, these days I suppose
you can watch some of essays on Youtube which was not available
in 1986:)
warmest regards,
Karen
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These are so entertaining! Poetry really needs to come off the page if it is going to attract a broader viewership.
A nice sestina, with excellent visual accompaniment. Thank you, ABB!
The poem is clear and direct, telling of the many beauties of Mexico, but also of the real dangers that are ever-present from the massive and uncontrolled criminality of the drug cartels.
Thanks for your kind remarks. No question that ABB’s video rendering enhanced my poem. He made me see my poem quite differently.
I would say this is a very effective poem judging by the passionate and well-described first reaction. One of the many opinions I’ve read on poetry’s purpose is” to evoke emotions and provoke thought”, and it has certainly done that. I also like the pairing of ABB’s videos on some poems and I think it serves this one well. I would like to see the poem written out though, because it’s hard (for me and maybe others) to single out the elements of the Sestina on listening.
Thanks to all involved in this thread.
Good point, jd. I’ll try to keep stanzas in mind for future videos, where relevant.
I, too, could have done with seeing the sestina written out, to see its form and shape.
That said, an interesting piece, with the MC dropping out / chilling out on a foreign beach and learning what’s going on in the world around him. Like the MC, I never realised there were crocs (Morelet’s crocodile) in that part of the world.
It was also good to see the map in the video with the Gulf of Mexico writ large and proud.
It’s sort of become the done thing to take ‘a gap year’ (as long as your parents have the money to fill the gap), so I had great empathy with the narrator, who would probably be returning to the rat race once the year is done – or maybe two.
Thanks for the read, Geoffrey.
Thanks for your kind remarks. My sestina was published here, back in January. https://www.classicalpoets.org/2025/01/mexican-sestina-and-other-poetry-by-geoffrey-smagacz/
This video rendering made my otherwise humdrum poem entertaining and accessible. Thank you, Andrew Benson Brown! You could be starting a whole new genre akin to music videos.