Using form: Jerome Betts, ‘Villanelle For Darcy’
Darcy the diabetic cat has died
His fans were told by email recently,
A life remembered with no little pride.
The Fiat-driver now feels mortified
To think because he simply failed to see
Darcy, the diabetic cat has died.
Was this the fatal ninth and last he’d tried?
Whichever, it will surely prove to be
A life remembered with no little pride.
His poor squashed frame has been discreetly fried
With all involved expressing sympathy;
Darcy the diabetic cat has died.
The people in his road could not abide
The flattening of such fine felinity,
A life remembered with no little pride.
So, some of them sent cards, and others cried
And stuck a sign upon his favourite tree:
Darcy the diabetic cat has died,
A life remembered with no little pride.
*****
Jerome Betts writes: “It’s always interesting when a line you read sparks off a quite unexpected result. In this case the line was in a friend’s email from Cambridge which mentioned in passing, as an item of local news, that Jasper the diabetic cat has died. Further details followed about one of those neighbourhood favourites known to many more people than its owners. Eventually, with Darcy substituted for Jasper (partly to secure a run of Ds and partly as I was at odds with a garden-molester of that name at the time) a villanelle took shape which was published in Snakeskin and subsequently in the anthology Love Affairs At The Villa Nelle (Kelsay Books, 2018) edited by Marilyn L. Taylor and James P. Roberts.”
Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the quarterly . Pushcart-nominated twice, his verse has appeared in a wide variety of UK publications and in anthologies such as Love Affairs At The Villa Nelle, Limerick Nation, The 1, 2 and 12, and Beth Houston’s three Extreme collections. British, European, and North American web venues include Amsterdam Quarterly, Better Than Starbucks, , The Asses of Parnassus, The Hypertexts, The New Verse News, and .
Photo: “Dead Cat” by Denty One is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
