Myriad Circles

Here is a poem from Myriad Circles, my book of poems with drawings by John Lincoln:

Nature-Myth
(Poem by Giles Watson. Drawing by John Lincoln.)

The Great Serpent is ovo-viviparous: the worlds she births
hatch instantly into snakes, and rush to shelter under her
thousand tongues. She can spit starlings out of the sky,
drink whole rivers, disarticulate her jaw to encompass
nebulae and black holes. A billion times or more, she
has become flesh, looped her coils about the ivy roots
climbing a stone wall, sloughed her skin on gorse, slipped
into the brook for chasing frogs, intertwined with those
venomous suitors of hers, hibernated in the cracks
between mossy rocks. Some swerve to kill her; others
gasp with awe – but out of the idea of her have grown
tentacles and tails, whips and tethers, tramlines, tunnels,
the rampant, hooded phallus, the sceptre and the noose.

So, Great Serpent, you have come to the spawning-place
to create, and out of you must burst a myriad pregnant circles.