Eleanor Cooke
Godric, the snake, and the silence.
Saint Godric, the first lyric poet in English,
shared his hermitage with snakes.
Halo of hair, white in the hawthorn hedge –
he’s forgotten to put his clothes on again –
he watches. The birds scatter.
He steps into the street
to buy baulks of wood and netting to build a hide.
A gang of schoolgirls
shriek and giggle and point at his prick and balls.
It’s then he sees her,
the adder. She knots herself at his feet.
He bends to touch the dry chevrons of gold.
The sun’s brought you out too, my lovely.
The schoolgirls scream.
Somebody wraps a blanket round Godric
and takes him to the Cottage Hospital. “Why
have you put me in a museum?”
Under the window beside his bed,
the adder listens to the sound of his weeping
as to a song of love.
Does anybody feel an absence
as his feet drop onto the pale concrete
of the deserted car park?
She leads, he follows.
They slip through shadow
beyond the builder’s yard, the houses, to where
the trees tangle into thickets
that shutter the lights of the town.
They build him a hide,
the snake and her sisters,
walls constructed of hazel sticks,
windows of air, roof a lattice of rain tilted
to catch his shadow.
The wood’s alive with the blackbird’s warning,
and the voices of songbirds dim to a hush,
a silence. Godric sings.
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