Padraig – Who Drove the Snakes Out of Ireland
At the allotment, daddy
forked the crumbly black earth
till the air quaked with anticipation
of excess, me sifting stones
in search of treasure;
the robin sat, pert,
on the lip of the bucket
meant to carry spuds or
cabbages or the occasional
giggle-tickle carrot back
to placate the mammy.
The bird's eye bright
with a lust for worms, his
song a crystal cataract of merry;
though none of the seeds we sowed
ever showed head out of the sly earth
and we saw nothing of the slow worm
daddy promised so that, his
name being Padraig too, I
guessed he must be a saint,
especially when he himself
vanished. Though
he turned up
months later
at the end
of school again
and again and again
till I had to tell
the mammy
where the books
and toys came from
which got me sent away
to board at St. Bridget's
convent where the head nun
was nice to you if your mammy
gave her fruit cake in a tin, bottles
of orange linctus sherry, a crocheted
shawl like frothy cobwebs, none of which
my mammy could afford, Padraig
having banished more than snakes.
Pratibha Castle’s work appears in print magazines including Sarasvati, Reach, Fly on the Wall Press, Imspired and various anthologies. It is featured in the online sites The Blue Nib, Impspired and Words for the Wild and is about to appear in Fragmented Voices. She has also published an award-winning pamphlet, A Triptych of Birds and A Few Loose Feathers (Hedgehog Press, 2021).