MY PHOTOGRAPHS show a carpet python resting on the pathway where I walk beside the creek. It prompted this blog entry. I have added the wonderful D.H. Lawrence ‘Snake’ poem in a similar vein although much deeper and more meaningful than something I could write.
🧡 Gretchen Bernet-Ward 2024

MY EXPERIENCE felt almost primordial. The snake must have just woken from its winter slumber and was enjoying the September spring sunshine and the warmth of the concrete path. It looked a bit thin and I hoped it wasn’t unwell. Perhaps it had not yet eaten, not fattened up on creek rats and other creatures of the murky water mixed with suburban drains.
This carpet snake had chosen to stop just in line with the shadows of the tree branches. An instinctive gesture? But I saw him first. I spoke to him/her (are living things really its) in a conversational tone saying ‘Now don’t you go up that embankment to the road. It wouldn’t be a good idea.’
The head turned and watched me as I snapped two photos and walked up the grassy embankment and stepped between the low pine-log fence posts. I looked around but saw no-one. It was nice to know a cyclist or mother with a pram were not coming this way.
Poor python, he’d never get lunch if he attracted a crowd.
I hope that patterned smooth skinned creature grows and matures and lives a quiet life. He’s probably asleep now on a flat grey rock at the edge of the creek, a bulge in that otherwise slim body.
I went on my way to post a letter, how old-fashioned of me. GBW.

‘Snake’ is one of the best-known poems from D. H. Lawrence’s nature-themed collection
Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923)
D.H. Lawrence was born 11^th September 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England
and died 2^nd March 1930, in Vence, France.
He was an English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays,
travel books and letters.
His ‘Snake’ poem is in the public domain.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/D-H-Lawrence

‘SNAKE’ by POET D.H. LAWRENCE
A snake came to my water-trough 
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid you would kill him.

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, 
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round 
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered further,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Poem from poet D. H. Lawrence’s nature-themed collection
Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923)

POSTSCRIPT
Morelia spilota, commonly known as the carpet python, is a large snake of the family Pythonidae found in Australia, New Guinea, Bismarck Archipelago, and the northern Solomon Islands.

https://bie.ala.org.au/species/https://biodiversity.org.au/afd/taxa/29af7856-f243-4db6-bde6-8c8f16172735