You carved me with your barbed border lines.
And ravaged my body of what I’d become,
Still bowed, my roots clutch your designs.
You wrote your dictionary that now defines;
Your limitless cruelty has rendered me numb.
You carved me with your barbed border lines.
In slow death, my treasure declines;
Looted, razed and bare, I succumb.
Still bowed, my roots clutch your designs.
My veins collapse into your colonising mines.
Your moral compass falters on a phantom rhumb.
You carved me with your barbed border lines.
With cold apathy, you ignored my warning signs;
Hands that seize in wreckage and in scum.
Still bowed, my roots clutch your designs.
Beneath my broken body, ocean-water climbs;
My buried faultline gathering the dark to come.
You carved me with your barbed border lines.
Still bowed, my roots clutch your designs.
About the Creator
River and Celia in Underland
Mad-hap shenanigans, scrawlings, art and stuff ;)
Poetry Collection, Is this All We Get?
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Comments (4)
The continuity of your two poems is like a chant that changes course with the same rhythm. I loved it!
A great villanelle, the message, the flow, the verbiage. Excellent job
This is great work! “You carved me with barbed borderlines” is such an incredibly powerful line i am legit glad it got the repetition! Each time I read it again I was impressed all over again. I hope this is for the villanelle of regret challenge, because I could easily see this winning— such a unique take but it still fits the theme perfectly. I really find the concept sharp and compelling, a letter from the earth to us, calling us out for the years of abuse and misuse. Also, I never knew what a rhumb line was before your poem made me google it :)
Amazing how the last hundred years have caused more natural destruction of our planet. Great words