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