Villanelle

Writing different forms of poetry tests your ability to write. Just like my other post with short stories; it’s writing outside your comfort zone.

Here is a villanelle, for those who don’t know what a villanelle poem is:

5 tercets (3 line stanzas) with ABA rhyme scheme, followed by 1 quatrain (4 line stanza) with ABAA rhyme scheme. The first and third lines of the tercet are alternately repeated as are the last lines of the remaining stanzas.

 

The nagging mother

I told you to clean your room. Clean this mess!

Constantly telling you to hang your clean clothes.

All of this nagging, do you think I like this stress?

 

Pick up your dirty clothes, we need to impress

and empty your bin, its beginning to decompose!

I told you to clean your room. Clean this mess!

 

You never know who will be our guest

but “boys will be boys” I suppose,

all of this nagging has given me stress.

 

In your lunchbox, it still has last weeks recess

throw out your old banana peels, you wont need those!

I told you to empty your bin and clean all of this mess!

 

Why haven’t you eaten your food? is there anything to confess?

if you don’t like the food I make, what do you propose?

has all of this nagging given you my stress?

 

I know you don’t like it, nevertheless

if you cleaned here and there as you go

I won’t have to say, what I told you, ‘clean your room, and clean this mess.’

I won’t have to nag and I won’t have to stress.

 

#DWTSmith #poetry

messy room

3 thoughts on “Villanelle”

  1. I love stuff like this.
    Not so much the nagging,
    but this kind of poetic bliss.

    Like chocolates, cheese and other things Swiss
    some talking and rapping
    and other stuff like this.

    I started on things Swiss,
    because I like climbing
    in a state of hypoxic bliss.

    That’s not why I started this,
    I can hear you thinking,
    Not at all why I started on stuff like this.

    You think I was taking the piss?
    You know I can hear you muttering
    and sure as anything you aren’t in a state of poetic bliss.

    I can’t do stuff like this,
    not any more. I’m not a poet.
    The only words I can think of to rhyme with Swiss
    are this and (poetic) bliss.