Ouroboros

In a Meditative State

Ouroboros
‘Putto met een Ouroborus’ (Giovanni Cattini 1735–1800) via Wikimedia Commons

Accredited scholar, Romulus.
The pencil shaves down Paradisio,
induces… naïveté. Romulus knows.
His is the graphic, the grey.
Erasing by inscribing — our city.

The cherub smiles, a serpent flail,
scaled ribbon in the child’s arms,
harmless. His future is writ.
Withstand, Romulus, tyrant
of the pen and ink. Yet a child.
Long gone, long gone,
yet to come, long gone.
History through a sieve.

In a meditative state, the snake
sheds hunger, considers
its taste
its wholeness
its power.
In the arms of a child, pause
and consider the human,
the question, his past.

Father and architect, the myth tells,
which he writes straight
from his head.

Father and architect say:
The wolf-child Romulus, demigod.
Scales drop onto papyrus,
swept off, swept under. The paper
tells the truth, we think.

Romulus the poet pencils a portrait,
gives a snake his name and empire.
Its fleeting life in the arms of a babe.


The Myth: Romulus and Remus

The legend of the founding fathers of Rome tells of a brother’s murder: Romulus killing his twin, Remus, for trespassing on the wall of their own city. Only then was the city named for him, the survivor. His presumed godly parentage and later disappearance led to his deification, renamed Quirinus. His name derives from ‘covirium’ meaning ‘assembly.’

Ouroboros

The image of the snake (or dragon) eating its own tail has been known to signify wholeness and the cyclical processes of life and death. I chose to interpret it as a symbol of hubris, combining the imagery with the mythical story of the inception of the most infamous empire in history. The image used is of a ‘Putto’ or cherub, which brought to mind the statues depicting the infant Romulus and Remus suckling from the she-wolf. The innocent and vulnerable child so close to the deadly animal, wolf or serpent, which grows to father an empire. To me, the image and myth are rife with hubris, which was a theme I wanted to incorporate into the poem.

The Process

This poem was an experiment in narrative voice, as I attempted to create a framed narrative. The unnamed narrator reflects on the mythology and legacy of Rome’s founder, subtly criticising history through animal and infant imagery. The distance from truth in our modern age is much shorter than the past, and the speaker is far from intellectual, only observing what is past and yet to pass. The imminent death of the empire is foreshadowed, as are the modern empires we still criticise.

I have always been enticed by the innate tragedy of empires, which is why the image of the ouroboros and the cherub initially stood out to me. Mythology and history to me are intertwined, so the drawing, though simple in style, holds deep meaning to me.

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