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Farewell

Chapter 26: LOVE POEMS THE GOLDEN SNAKE
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About This Book

A varied collection of poems and short prose pieces that celebrate the Cotswold and Gloucestershire countryside while exploring love, longing, and spiritual yearning. The poems range from concise nature lyrics—observing rivers, hedges, birds, and seasonal light—to sonnets and free-verse meditations that ask for vision, joy, and fellowship. Several pieces foreground homesickness and the solace of ritual and local customs, others offer wry or reflective commentary on mortality, vanity, and daily life. Prose poems and songs intersperse formal verse, producing a sequence that alternates celebratory rural description, quiet grief, religious petition, and gentle humour.

LOVE POEMS

THE GOLDEN SNAKE

Her body’s glory is a golden snake
Around Life’s tree
Coiled: the tree shall break
In the blast of Eternity
And the coil be crushed.
Too late! immortal poison has rushed
Through more-than-veins.
Beauty remains
Though bodies rot. The fang
(Though flesh the pang
To flesh deliver)
Strikes down more deep
Than flesh, to trouble
Even the ultimate sleep,
The eternal dream.
Though all she seem
To be, like a golden bubble
Shall break at the prick of Death,
This shall not break:
Her beauty’s sting: sharp as the sting of a snake:
The sting of Beauty failing not with breath.