Now, I've never really cared for the sestina as a poetic form. I mean, I like rhyme and rhythm in my poems, but a sestina, it has no set rhythm--Kipling and Swinburne seemed to use iambic pentameter for the most part while Auden's best known is in a kind of dactylic tetrameter catalectic--and instead of rhyme, it's got this weird shuffling pattern involving the words that end the lines of each stanza. And since you're repeating these six words in all six stanzas and again in the envoi, well, they've always seemed kinda repetitive to me.
But I succumbed to peer pressure. I admit it. See, this guy named Eric Burns does a fine commentary site called Websnark, the first "blog" I've ever followed with any regularity, now that I think on it...
Well, Burns went and wrote a sestina back in December of 2004--you can go to his site if you wanna find the particulars of why. But seeing it there set me to reconsidering the form. And it occurred to me that it would be a natural structure for Kestrel to use: both complicated and baroque, and with six stanzas, he could write one about each of the other characters in the comic. More or less.
So here it is.