431 AD
There were no snakes,
no Saint Patrick at the beginning:
There was the learned bishop Palladius,
son of Exuperantius, late
praefectus praetorio Galliarum
killed at Arles,
sent on order of saintly pope Celestine I to become a
missionary to pagan Eire
in the tenth year of the reign
of child emperor Valentinian III,
thus contemporary sources show;
yet memories unwritten
came apart,
holes in them were filled,
stories connected with myth
and written into annals,
becoming history.
Palladius came lost in the gloom
of the rugged shores of
time and remembrance.
Thus was Saint Patrick
of later memory born:
Begetted by the fading memories
of the merging shadows of
Palladius, dead in what would
be Scotland, and a man
under that later name -
himself lost in the decades
when the Roman eagle fell from its perch
in the fading Occident, dead,
on Odoacer's lap -
and given birth by scribal monks' styluses.
And, you ask, what about the snakes?
The devil driven from the new garden of Eden
won for Christianity -
but you first had to reintroduce
the devil to the garden,
from which he had been eradicated,
carefully brought across the
gray waves of the Irish sea
from the newly forged Christendom
to be let loose on the landscape
of religious memory.
01.06.2015-07.05.2020
