snakes

Poetry Writing Contest 24 (2009)
First Place
I began this piece by narrating my encounters with snakes. But it remained flat until I accepted that something deeper was going on. Time for research. Reptile science proved to be as poetic as myth and symbols; I grudgingly came to realize that snake “dream” consciousness painfully exposes humans’ failure to evolve beyond our primitive, violent origins. At the same time I felt a comic detachment from the reptile “philosophy,” much as we regard our own dream state. You cannot simply write what you already know. Writing must change your ideas or it is merely report writing. — M. Garrett Bauman