My ongoing wrestling match with the villanelle form.
Swaddled in those black and gold
silent depths of painted stone,
people drown! But they then glow
as “new life” snakes up from below
and doves are swimming in the light
swaddled in that black-and-gold,
although the colour left. Although
these doves have swelled to grey from white
and all the drowned began to grow.
Grown Gortoners resented those
deceiving gushes of new life
that swim in dried-up black-and-gold
and hacked that font and bruised the stone.
(A car park.) It decays outside
and sprouting in its blackened old
mouth are twists of overgrowth.
Squidditas 