AN EXTRAORDINARY POEM!
In simple text and texture,the poet successfully weaves a pattern where simplicity loaded with meanings virginal in nature resides!

NOTHING COULD BE SAID ON YOUR POEM,MR.M.DAVIES!IT IS MEANT TO ENJOY,NOT TO EXPRESS!


I LEFT MY GARB
LAYERED WITH ANXIETY AND ATONEMENT
OPENED
MY INNER RESERVOIR
RELATIVELY A SPHERE OF CALM:DEVOIDED OF CRASS CACOPHONY.
AND,LET THE POEM
TRICKLE DOWN
SEEMS
VERY OWN!VERY OWN!

Thanks!
M.JHA
SAMASTIPUR
BIHAR
INDIA.
MJ1982M@twitter.com

Lovely. And isn't it strange that this form, the villanelle, has become our poetic touchstone for death? What is it about the way the words echo, with a difference, that makes us so keenly aware of loss?

I like that your poem seems to treasure the loss, by embodying it in a building, which in dream-logic we can inhabit as a child, and the room is the parent's face in which we are named and protected, the room in which our father's identity become our own, his words become our words-- and of course, we must always leave him. Which brings into my own memory the work of Louise Bourgeois, which has always been praised as a critique of relationships, in the way she always constructed these elaborate totems and decaying memory-box houses as if this were a "reprimand" or a "complaint"; but having spent a great deal of time with her art, thinking about her subjects, I was ultimately left with an impression of the tenderness that always goes into these constructions, because (and not in spite of) their "morbid" connotations. Death is an occasion for tenderness and treasuring, isn't it?

I also quite like the way you twist and re-purpose the line from Macbeth-- again, changing the voice of a line with nightmare connotations, the Weird Sisters about in the gloom, Sphinx-like omen of patricide and doom-- into something more familiar (pardon the pun), like the routine expression of a well-read grandfather with an ironic sense of humor. Again, what I take away is the tenderness in this.

Thanks for writing.

Not strange at all, to think about why the villanelle has entered our secular cultural liturgy as a form to express grief and loss -- and for the reason you give, Brendan: "the way the words echo, with a difference". Our battle with grief is the battle to learn to accept new, lessened circumstances -- and resistant though we might be, that new reality slowly modifies our repeated insistence that it not be so.