A Snake Looking Back

Ah, Marina, I see our old bright skins,
Yours shed before I slid out of my egg.
Look at them both, gold on the sands, snake ghosts,
The gift of maintenance, the need to molt
That makes for life, our immortality.
It’s that, isn’t it? The ancients weren’t wrong,
Even if they were sadly mistaken.
Snakes do die, no matter how many skins,
But that’s life, isn’t it, successive deaths
The only kind of immortality,
The ability to maintain ourselves,
The capacity to outgrow our youth,
To devour, struggle forward, and look back
At shells of selves through widening sunsets.