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Found Poem: Joseph Campbell with Commentary
Posted on March 5, 2005 in Myths & Mysticism Poems
The lines for this poem come out of Campbell’s and Bill Moyer’s The Power of Myth. The lines marked in italics are commentary by me:
The moon sheds its shadow
The serpent sheds its skin
Life sheds one generation after another.
The serpent is but a travelling alimentary canal.
The world is but its shadow — a fallen skin.
A serpent flows like water
If Woman is Sin, then Man is Death.
Man does not enter life except by woman.
Out of Woman comes Man, punisher
and destroyer, uprooter
and decimator, exploiter
and strategist, smithy of
the iron hoe and the toothed saw.
The Garden is the serpent’s place.
Yahweh,
the one who walks there in the cool of the evening,
is but a visitor.
We know our beginnings better
than Adam did. There’s no feeling
our sides for the lost rib or finding
how we fit each other’s flesh-mold. When we
wake in the morning, we find ourselves
naked, having shed our
clothes in the evening of the world. We
dress and go out into the Garden, spade
and fertilize the earth, kill serpents
resting in the shade of imported ornamentals as if our
war never ended, as if all snakes
begin births that can only end darkly.
