Snake's Servant

A little background on this piece before you read it.  I've been in a creative writing workshop for two weeks, working on mastering different forms of writing.  One of the emphases in this workshop daily is exploring different forms of poetry.  This poem was written for an assignment on a form of poetry called Via Negativa.  You can play with the form and actually list things the item about which you're writing is NOT or, as I did (inspired by a poem called The Hand), write about what the object or idea IS by saying it is not that quality.

Another complication to writing this poem was we had to choose what our instructor calls a "wild word".  Before the instruction begins, we're given a slip of paper on which we are to write a single word.  Each slip is thrown into a bowl and we choose one at random.  On this day, my wild word was innocence.

The poem itself was very painful for me until a very fluid, beautiful line formed in my head, inspired by the dragonflies I'd been watching during the soccer games I attend on Mondays and Wednesdays.  From there, using descriptions of the dragonfly and bits & pieces from myths written about dragonflies, I was able to write a poem of which I am proud.



Snake's Servant


Neither graceful nor lithe,
Not propelled on wings of
Spider silk spun stained glass,
The dragonfly is neither dragon nor fly
Nor airborne acrobat,
Swirling and tumbling,
Never crashing,
Never ceasing.

Not prey,

Not toothy predator,
Neither overly large
Nor damselfly small,
The dragonfly does not fly
Nor does it scurry across water,
Exhibiting primal power...
     Presence...
          Poise.

The dragonfly does not

Measure the worth of a human soul,
Guilt or innocence,
Good or evil,
In the single stroke of
Startlingly self-clarity.

The dragonfly is not summer.

It is not autumn,
Neither prosperity...
     Potency...
          Purity.
It does not harmoniously hover
Just above the curves and
Contours of imagination.

The dragonfly is...

Nothing yet
Everything
For its very essence is the
Fluidity of cosmic, karmic change.