Monday 5 March 2012

A villanelle by the Swedish writer Majken Johansson


Villanelle made on a nail

The nail seems sometimes crooked sometimes straight
through the secretion that life’s cleft fills with its juices.
Who would not dearly wish to make the soup taste great?

Crammed here beneath one roof slurp from their plate
the picky and the shovellers down open sluices.
The nail seems sometimes crooked sometimes straight.

Jammed in one ice-hole in half-frozen state
for separate edges they must grope before it fuses.
Who would not dearly wish to make the soup taste great?

Just as pure need and mercy now seem to equate
so through the peering eye’s rent chink one thing bemuses:
the nail seems sometimes crooked sometimes straight.

Twist as you may, your back’s behind your pate
though you subject your lenses to all kinds of ruses.
Who would not dearly wish to make the soup taste great?

Even our wreck’s last splinter shares this fate:
‘Nature’s first law’ – to co-exist – brooks no excuses.
The nail seems sometimes crooked sometimes straight.
Who would not dearly wish to make the soup taste great?

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