The Tessellation’s Tale

The fourth century Bellerophon mosaic at Lullingstone Roman Villa, Kent

Gross curvilinear dolphins' bulging sides
Congest a scene across whose centre whirls
The hero on the Pegasus he rides
To spear the Monster, cloak and golden curls
Beneath the Seasons’ gaze, broad-shouldered girls.
Tell-tales, those curves, of models doomed to melt
Into a maze of loops and whorls and swirls
As fumbling apprentices had felt
A lost ancestral touch returning as they knelt?
 
Jerome Betts