#444 - up snakes and dance - a jig and a reel for St Patrick's

 

17.iii.21

444

2.76

up snakes and dance

a jig and a reel for St Patrick’s

 

in rustic stumbling Latin wrote

how he got this letter in a dream

and chase around after

confess

baptize a bit

 

he raises the dead

with mists for mystery

a barleycorn uppance it is

emerald for cliché

 

island out of the ice

no footless reptile ever trod

but hiss

 

all pray for the rain and potatoes

 

with reverence for empire

and later risings honour

 

once carried off by marauders

(according to Britannica)

of the Irish type of course

 

then desert days in England, ah

 

imagine, he hears voices

comes back to the greenest corner

this greenest world

must be the garden was here

why he’d come

 

and none of that free will heresy

‘holy servant boy’

so said voices in the letter in the dream

 

but Ireland then was nothing but snakes  

and it’s during this forty day fast (as one does)

 

red bellies, browns, tigers and pythons

green tree snakes, vipers

adders and asps and the rest

 

pagans the lot of them

if they weren’t Pelagians …

rather a Manichean than that!

all charmed off!

 

but later maybe someday swim?

 

he gives back all that the rich women gave him

 

so stiff necked the people

his staff of ash grows to a tree

while he waits for them to convert

 

against the charge of illiteracy

wrote some letters and this book

of snaking letters

 

they worship unclean things –

Druids in ambush, pirates come after  

saintly sings himself a mist for protection

 

‘the cry of the deer’ is a marvel of grammar

(that’s fanning with damp rays, if ever)

 

It’s only after, they write his life

find bells dropped off by angels

battle over the corpse

 

nor should one expect the sun

but pray for the rain

here it is

 

there weren’t any snakes to begin

 

it’s only singing makes so

 

against black laws of heathenry

the firmness of a rock