We’ve been here before, this renovated playground
Downhill from the church and the swimming pool
The children have swung in these swings
Dug this sand, scaled these rubber-studded walls
It’s only now I recognise it
Laid there between slide and sandpit
A snake cast in gormless green concrete
Tail caught between its own teeth

An ouroboros, a cannibalistic loop
symbol of the cycle of destruction
and creation and destruction…
Who thought these playgrounds appropriate loci
for gory, mythical memento mori?
The girl says “when people get old then they die.”
She adds, “not us though”, and I agree
“Not us,” I echo. “Not you. And not me.”

(This conversation didn’t happen then
call it poetic licence
the old lies and distortions
does it matter anyway, what happened when?)

The reptile’s hide is scored with runes
and gnomic pictograms
this is the Norse ouroboros
the world-girdling worm
Jörmungandr! The thunder god’s bane
when it lets slip that tail
Ragnarök! Everywhere, Ragnarök.
Ragnarök can wait
please?

But the snake grins still
and it always will
for our desperate prayers, however so fervent
mean nothing to the terrible Midgard serpent

© B.A. Williams

B.A. Williams is a British writer, now settled in Stockholm after a decade in Amsterdam. His flash fiction has appeared in FlashFlood, Drabble, and Guardian Online, and he’s recently turned to poetry to examine parenthood and life in a new country. You can find him on Twitter @mrbarrington