Dragons Turning Into Snakes
Samizdat Secret Series V2
53 poets, 91 Poems
Winter 2025
YOUR ASSIGNMENT, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE
TO ACCEPT IT….
Select one or more poems from this collection.
Print or write longhand on a piece of paper or object of your choice.
Post this relic in a public location as discretely as you wish.
Optional: Post to social with hashtag #dragonsturningintosnakes2025
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Dragons Turning into Snakes FINAL
a few words on the making of….
This is v2 in the Secret series. The first, “The Secret Book of Shadow and Light,” emerged from curating poetry on 6 floors of a NYC mansion for a 3 month social club. Poems on black card stock written in gold ink were created and selected for each floor–from darkness to light, lowest chakras to the highest.
Dragons turning Into Snakes is as much a snapshot of a moment in poetic space as a poet’s liturgy for entering, abiding and surrendering to the alchemy of winter, a darkness of mysteries we somehow live through or into. It moves through thresholds of a winter descent with a touch of romance, blooms of grief and naked silence towards hints of spring. From majestic pauses of snowfalls to rains, from womb-sleep to birthing, from hibernation, dreaming and metabolizing experience to readying for new adventures. Many of the poems take the reader off the page and into the world– like glowing ingots pulled from the blacksmith’s hearth.
What Dragons turning into Snakes conjures will be unique to everyone. Astrologically, 2024 was the Yang Wood Dragon year– a vast view and power with few resolutions. 2025 is the Yin Wood Snake– as if the dragon lands and draws all its power into a newborn snake, a terrestrial seed, a mystic current tunneling further. How does vast experience enter our deepest subconscious well? What to do with lightning?
Three main resources stocked this treasury of verse: 1) Poetry books at public libraries in NY; 2)Interweb vaults, starting with poems from 2024 leading to sites of poets and publishers; 3) Contributions from poet allies and my own trove. The hunt gathered 237. The final edition has 91. A great thanks and assist goes out to C.S. Doorley for his editorial read and support in some final selections and ordering. As the process unfolded, the work took on the quality of a band’s set list or a play moving through acts, each piece finding it’s place.
Consulting the i ching.
The Question: What hexagram best expresses the meaning of this collection and this moment for all who read it?
The answer: 53. Consider the Cafe au Soul readings.
Dragons Turning into Snakes FINAL
Along with a marvelous wealth of poetry, during this journey I reread Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books (her poem below) and found fresh gateways for griefwork in The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
Does the way lead out or in?
At the center, or the door, will I be free?
No choices left to make. I follow on
the maze whose gate and goal are mystery.
