Drowned Venice Poem by Phillip Ellis

By shanties fossilised into habitation,
the shore laps where the sun shone
that morning on oil, lapping listlessly.
Children bring rafts to the shore.

They drift outwards, among the teeth
of buildings snapped now corpses decaying and
grotesque ghosts. Only mud
chokes the once city, abandoned
and bound to the sea by a bond of despair.

Though the biennale lasts, in a way, in another
place, like Samothrace, the city itself
has drowned, its name now a bodiless sound.