'A Temple to Medicine Without the Medicine: 'Serpent on the Staff' by Louise Walsh at the Entrance to the Royal Victoria Hospital.

I love this sculpture, 'serpent on the staff' by Louise Walsh at the entrance to the Royal Victoria Hospital. And Martin Mooney was commissioned to write the poetry. 

The serpent is a symbol of healing. 

Martin Mooney wrote these words. 

'Helixes arranged by size, all machined and polished like a set of coiled up chimes. A kind of DNA for song for work and care is what it makes me think of. 

 

'An architect dreams of the new hospital

All day I’ve been thinking about the illnesses of the future but only tonight, in my sleep, did I see the people who will bear the treatment. Some of them not yet born or healthy today, fit as fiddles, they walked through undulant landscapes up to the glacier still to be built yet hospital’s glass cliffs. 

I imagine a temple to medicine without the medicine

And have to remind my dreaming self of how

The frontage I am visualising as a glacier has a glacier’s  millimetre per day motion in my direction.

And the crowd gathering in its glass doorway have not come to admire or worship but to be made well.'