Locked Room Mystery (redivivus)

The caterpillar   with shrivelled skin

in a tent of silk    was laid therein.

This crumpled thing,   shrunk like a shroud,

was laid in silk   white as a cloud.

The sons of men   stood round about

warding the worm   should not get out.

Three days they stood   with solemn face,

never eyes wavering   from that place.

Then did they open   that mute cocoon,

and stood amazed:   the worm was gone !

Then some believed   and some did doubt

how that the worm   could have got out.

Yet to the sky   in spiral rings

the new flew forth   on crystal wings.

~

[ For a tale of Paschal miracle:
Murphy Makes a Mitzvah ]

.

Heroic hemihexameter

Try-pots   the Térror   of  Pénguins

[Fragment discovered beneath an iceberg in Antarctica.]

Tectonic ditty

The Dover cliffs

are of a piece

with facing cliffs

in France.

-- Richard Fortey, Earth

Burmese Blues

There was something horrible  in that blue, blinding sky,

stretching on and on  over Burma and Siam.

[--George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934)]

A Parable from Olde Berlin

During the days of hyperinflation:

Once in Berlin,

a man was about to pay ten marks for a box of matches, when he stopped to look at the banknote in his hand.

On it was written: “For these ten marks  I sold my virtue.”

He wrote a long, virtuous story about it,

was paid ten million marks,

and bought his mistress a pair of artificial silk stockings.

-- Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return (1934; rev. 1951), p. 81