Twilight on St. Patrick's Day

The rain has abated, now at dusk. The weekend of green revelry closes to Sunday night thoughts of Monday's reality.
St. Patrick, the long dead son of the Roman occupation of Britain, still remains a legend, even though research clearly shows there were no snakes In Ireland. The only snake type thing is a 'slow worm', actually a small reptile which, over time, lost its legs and now resembles a tiny garter snake, hardly in need of the power of a Bishop with his holy miter.

St. Patrick died a little over 1500 years ago today, a period of time long enough to cause his green legend to be left alone. The pictures of him driving snakes into the sea, in our children's book  " The  Stories of the Saints", stands iconic in artistic depictions even now.  Another example of the necessity of Mythology in the course of the mundanity of the human experiment, because a good image is almost impossible to shake.

When I was small, and I drew shamrocks on construction paper, and we had special mass in the morning before school, it was not mentioned that this bishop opposed the Druids. Those Pagan people who did things like build Stonehenge to chart the movement of the stars. The word 'Pagan' was synonymous with ignorance, immorality, and a kind of dirty savageness. When the Catholics went around slandering other civilizations to puff up their own story, it is no wonder why people of other persuasions didn't always like them. Another case of a religion pouting myopic and defensive like an adolescent caught in a love triangle.

I attended the Orchard Society spring grafting fair today, and I really think I must be a Pagan. Being in that fairgrounds building with hundreds of people, all ages, gathering scions to graft to roots, talking to each other about plants and hundreds of different types of apples, or pears, or cherries, or grapes felt like a mass. Holy people who can get excited by what otherwise appear as buckets of  twigs gave off a bright spirit, undeniable. This felt like the religion I might belong to.

St. Patrick, what will be left of you? Irish car bomb hangovers and discarded green mardi gras beads.
The house smelling like corned beef and cabbage. The green hurts-the-eyes grass of spring, taunting the lawn mower. The snow over the daffodils, and the luck of the Irish, the ones who escaped the potato famine from which the church did not protect them.

The Heart Consists of Four Chambers

The Heart Consists of Four Chambers:

An atrium and a ventricle on the right
 and an atrium and a ventricle on the left.

Blood returning to the heart from
veins all over the body flows
into the right atrium.

From there the blood flows
into the right ventricle.
The right ventricle then pumps it
to the lungs for oxygenation.

The oxygen rich blood returns to
the left atrium,
from there the blood flows into the left ventricle,
which pumps it at high pressure
into the arteries.

This entire process constitutes one
heart beat.

This in not a poem, and it is a poem. I think the body,
This human body is
a poem.