Snake
By Dannie Abse
When the snake bit
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa
while he was praying
the snake died. (Each day
is attended by surprises
or it is nothing.)
Question: was the bare-footed,
smelly Rabbi more poisonous
than the snake
or so God-adulterated
he’d become immune
to serpent poison?
Oh great-great-great-uncles,
your palms weighing air,
why are you arguing?
Listen, the snake thought
(being old and unwell
and bad-tempered as hell)
Death, where’s thy sting?
In short, was just testing:
a snake’s last fling.
Yes, the so-called snake
was dying anyway, its heart
calcified and as old as Eden.
No, that snake was A1 fit
but while hissing for fun it
clumsily bit its own tongue.
No, Hanina invented that snake;
not for his own sake but for first-
class, religious publicity.
No no, here’s the key to it.
Ask: did the Rabbi, later on,
become a jumpy, timid man?
Remember, he who has been bitten
by a snake thereafter becomes
frightened of a rope …
Bearded men in darkening rooms
sipping lemon tea and arguing
about the serpent till the moon
of Russia, of Latvia, Lithuania,
Poland, rose above the alien
steeples—centuries of sleep.
Now, tonight, a clean-shaven rabbi
who once studied in Vienna
says snake-venom contains
haemolysins, haemo-
coagulants, protolysins,
cytolysins and neurotoxins
and that even in Hanina
ben Dosa’s day a snake was a
snake—unless, of course, it was
a penis, an unruly penis,
making a noise like one pissing
on a mound of fresh hot ashes.
Oh great-great-great-uncles
did you hear him? And are your
handbones weighing moonshine?
Copyright Credit: Dannie Abse, “Snake” from New and Collected Poems, published by Hutchinson. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited, http://www.randomhouse.co.uk.
Source: White Coat Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1988 (Penguin Putnam Inc., 1994)