Our Genesis Theme - Page 2
48 poets contributed to this project. Read their varied interpretations and expressions on the theme of Genesis below:
On this page: poems by Graham Nunn, Holly Painter, Mike Scheidemann, Bunny Iskov, A.D. Winans, L.V. Sadler, Bernice Lever, Jenna Luksetich, Ada Aharoni, Lilian Cohen, Tirzah Ben David, David Fraser, Helen Bar-Lev, Yakov Azriel
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The following works are copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the authors.
Graham Nunn
Graham Nunn is a Brisbane based writer, co-founder of Small Change Press (www.smallchangepress.com.au) and a founding member of Brisbane's longest running poetry event, SpeedPoets (www.speedpoets.org). His work has been described as assured, achieved & ambitious. He has published 4 collections of poetry, the latest, Ruined Man is now available from www.smallchangepress.com.au
Genesis
we call it
sunlight
it is my language
my pulse
it skips across the heart
like an infant
taking its first step
toward mother
desperate to see
creation again
we call it
morning star
face flushed red
it slips away
age reflects
its leaving
and burns my eyes
we call it fire
slowly it disfigures everyone
as we stand
at the edge of day
naked with the thought
of beginning
Tideland
In this house the past is tidal, always
it comes when we least expect it, like a wave
the face of someone who rose and fell
apart at the edge of our lives.
Doorframes shiver in August wind
clocks remind now, now, now
and the retinue of loss foams out
brilliant, sea-white, then sinks away.
Always the feeling comes, that life
was better back then and this wave-borne one
was part of it. The weight of nostalgia
that wet clot of sand in the heart, outweighs
every living existence.
And the walls rub thinner, the water seeps in.
Wet Season
In times of swollen cheeks when sunlight twists
into your heart and women bathe waist deep
beside the road, the sound of water, almost like singing
a song of praise in itself. So much clings to us
the conversation of birds in dusk damaged trees
the rice paddy's wispy moan. At the heart of the region
shadows of afternoon unlid their eyes, noiseless
and unrepentant. There is no longer depth of perception.
Somewhere two men collide without breaking.
Angel Hair
In the light of turned milk she appears
coated with an infinite layer of dust
that settles on moth’s wings
Extracts fine hairs from her chin
with a rapid pull of fingers to pass the hours.
There is no nightlife, no black and red
roulette wheels once dreamed of
She alone exists, a tiny nest of hair
in her palm, waiting for the light
of extinction to cast them into the breeze
where they will gather:
form rings of age
in the trunk of her willow
Holly Painter
Holly Painter is a Detroit to Los Angeles to New Zealand transplant. She is working on her MFA at the University of Canterbury and lives in a rather drafty flat with her partner.
Concerning the Regenerative Properties of Asteroidean Echinoderms
The unfortunate starfish who, owing to carelessness, accident,
or aggressive posturing, misplaces an arm or two,
need only wait. The star's stumps will sprout new
arms in time, each supplied with spines, microscopic eyes,
tube feet, and ampullae teeth, all trim and tidy.
Meanwhile, the mislaid arms float away to some private place
each to undertake the growing of an entire replacement sea star.
Some populations supplement or supplant sexual reproduction
with calculated amputation drives. Individuals appear undisturbed
by these infinite divisions and revisions of identity.
A Post-Modern Baby
When I’d gone some nine months without making love
I said, “In this post-modern world
I’ve carried to term a nonbaby
Who will grow up in the nonspace of elsewhen.
Perhaps it will find love there.”
Here’s hoping.
Protoceratops
65 million years after the Cretaceous decline of an egg-laying herbivore about sofa-sized, that four legged beast with a beak and a frill enjoyed at last from the Greeks a resurrection in full. The skeleton fossils of the plant-muncher of old had littered the Gobi's rich regions of gold. Then along came the Scythians round 800 BC, nomads mining gold in the perilous heat. Stumbling on the bones, it rather made sense to them that treasures of gold should have such fierce guardians. The Scythians inferred from the shoulder blades, wings. A beak, a neck frill, they made a note of these things. In 680 BC, when they roamed into Greece, the Scythians gave reports of great fearsome beasts: murderous lions with eagle-beaked heads. They laid eggs in the ground and killed miners, they said. The Greek poets featured the creature in tales of battles with heroes preordained to prevail. So the peaceful Protoceratops had its revival as the mythical griffin: majestic, homicidal.
A Pregnant Statue
And if you stood there for sale, a statue frozen in a shop window,
Not Galatea, not Hermione, not created of a man's love or hate,
But simply pregnant, a bulge at your middle unchipped away,
Left there to nourish and shelter the marble boy growing inside
And to welcome a man’s ear, pressed close to listen –
If you stood there in white, mistress of your marble home
Great belly tucked under an ironing board as you flattened socks,
Your ankles swollen with the pressure of expectant limestone,
Aggravated by each labored step to the attic, where your textbooks languished
While you drew grocery money from your husband's account –
If you stood there, chiseled into some semblance of softness,
Stripped of your Doc Martin boots and heavy dungarees,
Your solid form sculpted by another into a cold study of curves,
The subtle and outrageous folds of a woman, a mother, a wife,
A female body, declarative, undisguised, your own but different,
The you you didn't choose –
If you stood there, a pregnant statue gazing out of a shop window
At a curly headed nymph, leaning on a newspaper stand, captivated,
Would you know me still, my handsome stone-faced androgyne?
Baby Wants
or Mama Was a Linguist
Baby wants
Baby wants
Baby wants a poon to slather marmite on her bread
Consonant cluster reduction! her mama linguist said.
"Poon! Poon! Poon! Poon!"
Baby wants
Baby wants
Baby wants her dandad to swing her down the drive
Retrogressive consonant assimilation! Mama jived.
"Dandad! Dandad! Dandad! Dandad!"
Baby wants
Baby wants
Baby wants her aunties to bount her on the tramp
Plosification of a fricative! Mama linguist enjambed.
"Bount! Bount! Bount! Bount!"
Baby wants
Baby wants
Daddy tells Mama he wants another baby
Family cluster expansion?
Mama linguist says maybe.
Mike Scheidemann
Mike Scheidemann was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and raised in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He read English and French Literature at Cape Town University before devoting himself to poetry and socialism on Kibbutz Yizre'el, in northern Israel. He is currently President of Voices; The Israel English Poetry Association and was senior coordinator of the XIII World Congress of Poets in Haifa in 1992 and of the Congress of Conflict Resolution Through Culture and Literature in 1999, launched by IFLAC; The International Forum of Literature and Culture.
The Awakening of Man
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon man and he slept;
And he took one of his ribs….And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man,
made he a woman
and brought her unto the man.
verses 21 & 22 Genesis Chapter 2
And God caused man to fall into a deep sleep
And to dream because that way man could imagine that he was content
And be whatever he imagined himself to be.
But when he was split into a man and a woman
Or when his rib was taken to create woman
He learned that he was alone; that is he awoke; together they awoke
And life, all life; their lives in particular became a relationship
In which there was no real place for dreams.
My Own Kind of Genesis
Earth was once a tapestry of tumbling gems
Bathed in halcyon days, blessed by a benign star.
Seas receded, revealing a crumbling contoured formation.
Swamps were drained away in waves. A flurry of life followed.
Finally man covered the land and coveted it, as far as he could see.
He sighted the horizon where the sun made fire of waves
But behind him, earth soon stretched bleak as a battlefield;
Fields gained pallor of decay with pastures green as mould.
All that was once pristine shrank before desert scopes.
We with infinite smallness had spoiled a forsaken world.
It all began with the first human thought.
Then an ocean’s jade exploded, awash in the spume.
It provoked typhoons, God’s anger upon us
And we evoked monsters, behemoth and leviathan,
Our minds in a quandary. In the beginning was the word
Signifying envy. Our eyes glittered and all coolness
Was trapped in a prism. All rainbow hues snapped
And scattered into translucence that we call brightness.
Undeterred man made form, for his masterpiece
Created something from nothing, substance out of space.
I eventually gleaned that life was born from a wild sea,
In simplicity I returned to the source of carnality,
And called it awareness, God’s work or that darkness
That precedes the mind. Meanwhile man the apprentice
Built Babel, a lighthouse, strung out on a jetty,
A beam piercing the face he called God. I found
My reflection which I called profound conscience,
But it was all, only a morass of imperfections;
And frustrations; my violence, my hatreds, my jealousy
My strongest weakness was the price of my perceptions.
Bunny Iskov
I.B. (Bunny) Iskov is the founder of The Ontario Poetry Society. Her work has been published in many fine literary journals and anthologies. She has one full collection and several chapbooks.Bunny is married to Larry and they have two children.
Before The Flood
Once, when the earth was young
and Eden just a garden,
the names of clouds were only a sigh.
Once, when the smallest shiver
wafted through autumn,
a fashion statement resonated
in basic green.
Once, when no shame
and life were contained in a breath
each moment ignited in a glimpse
between mouths full of fruit.
Once, while everything still fresh and naïve,
the twilight brimmed a rainbow
of benevolence and gold.
Once, when my man was just a boy
and terror a horror movie
each peace protest from a flower child
sang a new era.
Once, when buildings were giants among men
and the telephone a dynamic lifeline
gentle shadows hushed a tableaux of fury
between flightless flora and fauna.
Once, when beasts were confined to zoo cages
and communism the perfect enemy
rain-soaked and dramatic
iron fear curtained a new born question.
Once, when snakes could walk the earth
and apples promised wisdom in a bite
the air harnessed a rhapsody of fire.
A.D. Winans
A.D. Winans is a graduate of San Francisco State. His poetry, prose and photography have appeared internationally in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including American Poetry Review (article on Bob Kaufman), Rattle, Confrontation, Poetry Now, City Lights Journal, Poetry Australia, the New York Quarterly, and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. In 2004 a song poem of his was performed at Tully Hall. In 2006 he was awarded a PEN Josephine Miles award for literary excellence. In 2007 Presa Press published a book of his selected poems.
Creation
I think of poems not yet written
Stillbirths in a sterile womb
Tiny hearts fluttering like a butterfly
Unbuttoning the vest of my mind
These unconceived children
Playing pitter-patter with my heart
The weight of their eyes
Pressed into my flesh
Like a branding iron
Smoldering against a scrap
Of cloth
L.V. Sadler
Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published widely in academics and creative writing. Editor, poet, fiction/creative nonfiction writer, and playwright, she has a full-length poetry collection forthcoming and has published several chapbooks. She has won The Pittsburgh Quarterly’s Hay Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Hemley Award, and Asphodel’s Poetry Contest and tied for first place in Kalliope’s Elkind Contest.
Alas, Poor Janus; Alas, Poor January
Janus used to maintain his figure
swiveling to look fore and aft,
keep gates closed and open
(except in times of war).
Now Janus is no longer John of Gaunt.
The Foodies have filled up
Janus’s namesake, January,
sated the poor old thing
as if he were a goose
a-fattening for pâté de foie gras.
They’ve made him National Soup Month,
sired by him National Pie Day.
What chafes most, January’s chaffy,
can’t winnow all his wheat from chaff,
for he’s become both
Wheat Bread and
Bread Machine Baking Month,
and the chaff keeps piling up!
If that weren’t enough
to make him
explode from bulking up,
he’s also parented Popcorn Day.
Do they know whereof
they’ve done this satiating?
To feed a primal fear!
The Saxons called our January
Wulf-monath—when food was scarce,
and wolves went after people.
Why God Resorts to Private Journal
Presumption, thy name is Human.
I abhor “In God’s own time,” “God’s will be done,”
“But for the grace of God . . . ,”
“Everything’s for the best in God’s Plan,”
“acts of God,” much less
“God rest ye, merry gentlemen,”
“God for Harry! England and Saint George!”,
but, most, “God made me do that”!
The likes of Al “Scarface” Capone and
“Big Jim” Colosimo
took oaths of peace in My name
on the Argos Lectionary
at the latter’s restaurant in Chicago.
It became known as “the Gangsters’ Bible.”
Anathema!
Verily, I weary of being blamed
for bad translations
and other foolishness in matters temporal,
including love affairs.
As Milton has My angel Raphael
do in Paradise Lost,
I could blush a “celestial rosy red.”
Waxing wroth every several millennia,
I resort to this journal
(not tablets of stone, handwriting on the wall,
whirlwinds, burning bushes, etc.,
which are public) for catharsis.
Heaven forbid it fall into the wrong hands.
Thus it won’t. My only audience
will be My Son.
Maybe Daughter in some future dispensation.
At least, the Catholic Women’s Network thinks
Christa will get further than
God-She and God Is Dead.
In this journal I also report
My private experiments
in My private voice
(or any voice at all).
From the Quill
Birds of literary feather
flock together,
not a whit afraid of being trite.
The Harlequin Ducks,
prolifically romantic,
host novel poetry slams.
Seeded by Merlin,
The Ancient Murrelet
waters whole slams with his rimes,
to which all present
try to drink in meter.
The Phalarope Patonly
comes too late each time,
frankly proclaiming
he doesn’t like rhyme.
The Chipping Sparrow insists
upon playing golf,
has never made
the Grand Poetry Slam.
The Grosbeak is banned
for Hawking Bushtit and Wrentit.
(I, of course, quote!)
Other birds prefer
their prose refined.
Cooper’s Hawk eyes writing
The Prairie Falcon with
“Deerslayer” molting into “Killdeer.”
At the worst of times, Dickens wonders
why he didn’t think of “Smew.”
Forster’s Tern, no fly-by-night,
touts The Cinnamon Teal.
The Raven feels evermore overflown.
Astride his nesting site, he perches,
sits, and nothing more.
If asked, he proclaims himself
more biblical than Crow
a full flood’s age before E. A. Poe.
He’d like to ship out with Owl
(though afraid of Pussycat).
But when Spruce Grouse
offered to fly him off in Spruce Goose,
he promptly wrote The Aviator.
Still, all the pol parrots concur:
no poetry slam can ruffle feathers
like The Parlement of Foules.
Bernice Lever
Bernice Lever, a Canadian poet living on Bowen Island, BC, has eight poetry books, published and a ninth will be published in 2009. She has read her poems on five continents, and enjoys meeting other poets worldwide. A freelance editor, she is passionate about the journey towards peace and justice. Her site is www.colourofwords.com.
Awaiting
First, apple blossoms fell
in Eve’s garden
scenting both their shadows
beneath a magical candy cotton sky,
still awaiting the first
fruit to be ripe
enough to eat.
Second, scatter their seeds
to the four corners
of the blue wind.
Jenna Luksetich
Jenna Luksetich grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. She is attending Winona State University in Minnesota as a freshman with a major in Physics. Jenna writes as a hobby and hopes to get her name known to readers all over the world. She enjoys writing poetry along with profound prose. As she is only 18 she has very little to share about her life experiences but every day she adds new ideas and knowledge to her repertoire.
The Beginning of Time
At first a complex speck of dust,
Does lye so still in dark surround.
When mass becomes too much it must,
Ignite and stretch no longer bound.
From this comes our great life and place,
But most of all comes time and round.
Will we be lost when life be haste,
Because we know not time’s true lull?
Because we think that we may waste?
But what if we were always wrong,
And objects, not time, move along.
Ada Aharoni
Ada Aharoni (Ph.D), is an internationally renowned poet and writer, who has been called "The Poet of Love and Peace." She has published 25 books (amazon.com), and is recipient of several international prizes and awards, including the World Crown of Poetry, the British Council Poetry Award, and the Haifa and Bremen Literature Prize, and she has been elected one of the "Hundred World Heroines" (Rochester, New York). She is the Founder and International President of IFLAC PAVE PEACE Association: The International Forum for the Culture of Peace, and LENA: League of Jewish and Arab Women for Peace in the Middle East. She is the editor of 2 magazines: Galim (Waves), and the online IPRA magazine: Horizon, and is the head of the "PCC: Peace Through Culture and Communications Commission" of IPRA: The International Peace Research Association.
Mount Carmel Pomegranates
The trees smile, the trees laugh, the trees sigh,
and every pomegranate on Haifa's Mount Carmel,
peals its genesis bell - song:
take her tenderly by the hand
wherever you go,
she is part of you
we are witness.
The trees whisper,
the trees weep,
the trees sleep,
when he goes away
and leaves her smile behind,
awakes at morning
in a snow land
kissing his own
cold hand...
Lilian Cohen
Lilian Cohen came to Israel in 1968 from Melbourne, Australia. After a year on Kibbutz Yizrael, she moved to Haifa with her husband and raised two children. Since retiring three years ago as an English teacher at Leo Baeck Senior High School, she divides her time between Haifa and Melbourne. She began writing poetry and short stories in 1994, some of which have been published in Israel, the States and New Zealand. She has been a member of the editorial board of the annual Voices Israel anthology.
Genesis
My cocoon thins
worldly beams invade the dark
dissonance shivers the walls
I tremble
waiting to emerge.
Tirzah Ben David
Tirzah Ben-David was born in 1949 in Liverpool, England, and read English Literature at Cambridge University. After visiting Israel as a kibbutz volunteer she converted to Judaism in 1977 and received rabbinic ordination from Leo Baeck College, London in 1996. She is a member of Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi and visiting rabbi to the Shir Hatzafon Progressive Jewish Community in Copenhagen. Her first book of poetry 'Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute' was published in Britain in 1988. Her second book 'Consider the Heroes' was published in Israel in 2005 in a bi-lingual edition by Gvanim, with Hebrew translation by the Israeli poet Oded Peled.
Excursion Genesis 22
My father steps into the yard
And sniffs the air;
A day of budding silences,
A day to be distrusted
But not to be denied
A day when fathers dally
With their sons
And promise to be home by tea time
We pass the playground and the school,
Tiny boats salute us from the lake
Come to see us off
Beside the road my death
Keeps pace;
I watch it from the corner of my eye
Loping in and out
Between the trees
My father marches straight ahead
He can’t afford distractions
Our footsteps blur
Mine sometimes stumble
‘Stop’ I want to say
‘I’m tired
I’m frightened
Take me home’
But of course I don’t;
We both know that I never will
That’s how God’s will
Gets done
My father is a hero, prophet
Man of steel;
His right hand wields decision
And the knife
The silence that his left hand
Pleads with
Isn’t mine.
David Fraser
David Fraser is the founder and editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine since 1997 http://www.ascentaspirations.ca/. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in over 50 journals including Three Candles, Regina Weese, Ardent, Quills and Ygdrasil. Recently David has been accepted in Rocksalt, a new Anthology of Contemporary BC Poets to be launched in the fall of 2008. He has published a collection of his poetry, Going to the Well (2004), a collection of short fiction, The Dark Side of the Billboard (2006 ) and a second collection of poetry, Running Down the Wind that appeared in 2007 David is currently the Federation of BC Writers Regional Director for The Islands Region.
Muse
On your haunches, you sit
knees bent, gripping them
with tight clasped arms,
sun reflected in your sad pensive eyes.
I feel your concrete presence,
light angles of your reflection,
a stillness in your constant form,
on dull grey quiet days, or
sun-drenched moments with more smiles.
I touch your forehead, fingers smooth
across your brow.
You seem to move
within my thoughts,
you fill me with all the breath
to continue on.
At times I hear the rush of air
so in and out through
your nostrils as you wait
for all the clutter to
settle into dust.
This breathing is my breath,
brings me to the still point
in the mirror, my reflection
in the water undisturbed,
my immersion in the cool
waters of the lake, my other medium,
your place so quiet,
knees bent, hunched,
arms hanging on, a foetus
of a thought.
Helen Bar-Lev
Helen Bar-Lev was born in New York City in 1942. She has lived in Israel for 36 years. Since 1976 Helen has devoted herself to art: painting, teaching and poetry. From 1989 - 2001 she was a member of the Safad Artists’ Colony where she had her own gallery. To date Bar-Lev has had 80 exhibitions, including 30 one-person shows. Her poems and paintings have appeared in numerous online journals and print anthologies. ‘Cyclamens and Swords’ with poems of Israel by Helen and Johnmichael Simon and Helen’s paintings has been published by Ibbetson Press, Boston, Mass. Helen is Editor-in-Chief of the Voices Israel annual Anthology.
Eden Revisited
What really happened
in the Garden of Eden
when that sneaky serpent
determined our future
was Eve actually innocent,
Adam absolutely complacent,
or were they bored, curious humans
ready for a snake to relieve their routine
was it yellow, red, green, dappled
that infamous apple
that disgraced Eve
and put Eden on the map
was it Grant, Delicious, Macintosh,
that sinful apple that
abolished innocence
that took Eve and Adam
and put them into history books
that brought the fig leaf into fashion
that made Adam’s neck bulge
that left Abel dead
that bolted the gates to Paradise
and banished humanity to the libraries
to quest for knowledge, denied otherwise
do you want to tell me
that the Lord in all his wisdom
could not foresee the outcome
when he created the serpent
and an inquisitive woman?
Yakov Azriel
Yakov Azriel was born in New York and came to live in Israel when he was 21. His first book of poems, Threads From A Coat Of Many Colors: Poems On Genesis, was published in June 2005 in the USA by Time Being Books, and his second book of poetry, In The Shadow Of A Burning Bush: Poems On Exodus, is being published in the autumn of 2008. Over 100 of his poems have been published in journals in the USA, the UK and Israel, and his poems have won thirteen awards in international poetry competitions, as well as a fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
The Shabbat Window
“And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it; because on it He rested from all His work that God in creating had made.” (Genesis 2:3)
time,
twisted and distorted by weekday storm,
recuperates and calms down
on Shabbat,
giving birth to a window
that expands and opens
as time, now a dark blue,
closes.
on the Shabbat window-sill
time rests
like a fat, purring cat.
the cat watches
as outside the window
sanctity peeps out of a distant, hidden nest
like a hungry fledgling
whose mother is not a week-day.
the cat looks up
to peer
outside the window
as sanctity flashes in the heavens
like a sudden comet
whose father is not a week-day.
the cat looks down
on her side of the window
to gaze
at two candles
that burn like memorial flames
for Jephthah’s daughter,
lit by Dinah, returned from Shechem.
the Shabbat window now becomes a wind;
time rises like a butterfly,
uplifted and gliding
like a little bird or a comet
higher than a cloud,
until it becomes a rainbow
splashing the heavens
with all the colors of sanctity.
listen! the Shabbat,
dressed in scarves and veils,
has begun to sing.
The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
“And the Woman said to the Serpent, ‘From the fruit of the other trees in the Garden we may eat, but from the fruit of the Tree in the middle of the Garden, God had said, ‘Do not eat from it nor touch it, lest you die.” (Genesis 3:2-3)
On the bark of the trunk of the Tree
Of Knowledge of Good and Evil,
A scarlet-crested woodpecker drills a hole,
Opening a window.
Listen! Inside the Tree echo the sounds
Of sword hitting sword, the blast of cannonades,
Gunfire from an airplane, an atom bomb exploding,
All screeching: Death.
And look! Inside the Tree now flash the letters
And ideograms in all alphabets: Latin and Cyrillic,
Sumerian and Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew, Mayan and Sanskrit,
That spell out: Death.
Beware! Inside the Tree lies Abel’s tombstone,
While from within the Tree and out of the hole wafts the stench
Of rotting corpses scattered on battle-field after battle-field:
The stink of Death.
Don’t touch! Inside the Tree coalesces its sap,
Sticky, thick and red;
The sap begins to slowly drip out of the hole,
Each drop pregnant with Death.
Behold, the Serpent cunningly winds and wraps its body
Around the trunk of the Tree, to cover and hide the hole;
Behold, Eve does not see nor smell nor hear;
Behold, she now bites into the fruit.
The Guardian to the Gate
“So He drove out the man; and to the east of the Garden of Eden, He placed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turns in every direction, to guard the way to the Tree of Life.” (Genesis 3:24)
East of the cherubim, east of the flaming sword,
The Guardian to the Gate of the Garden of Eden waits,
Shaded from the sun by a pillar of cloud by day,
Her eyes lit up by a pillar of fire by night.
The Guardian to the Gate of the Garden of Eden stands
Dressed in a soft white gown woven of words
Disregarded and verses discarded, barely remembered.
The Guardian does not stir in her vigil, listening, observing.
She gazes at us as we slowly crawl closer
On our hands and our knees, over embers and chipped metal.
We crawl and we come despite our scratches and burns,
Like moths to a beckoning light, drawn by the fragrance
Of blossoms and fruit and leaves on the Tree of Life,
Whose scent overwhelms us, making us drunk with dreams
Barely remembered, with verses discarded and words
Once disregarded; — now awake, now aflame, now alive.
The Guardian to the Gate of the Garden of Eden clasps
The latch of the Gate and locks it; she turns her head
And cries
As we fall, retreat and forget, the scent of the Tree
Now barely remembered, buried in verses and words.
The First Night
“Now the man knew his wife Eve ….” (Genesis 4:1)
On the first night after the Expulsion,
When Eden was still a warm memory
Of jasmine's fragrance, and citrus orchards amidst the beds of spices,
The sweet taste of fresh pineapples and ripe plums,
Giant mango trees that both blossomed and bore fruit,
The softness of thick grass under bare feet,
Flocks of blue peacocks in Eden's meadows,
Flocks of green parrots in Eden's branches,
Flocks of pink cranes covering Eden's skies —
On that first night after the Expulsion,
It rained.
Adam and Eve slept on the wet ground,
Not knowing where to find a cave
Nor how to make a fire,
Their only light a distant gleam
Of the flaming sword which turns every which way,
Guarding the path to the Garden
They would never see again.
As it rained, Eve shivered
And cried.
Adam stretched out his arm
And pulled Eve closer
To stroke her cheeks and eyes.
First love.
Seth's Bar-Mitzvah
"After Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, he begot a son in his own likeness, after his image; and his name was called Seth." (Genesis 5:3)
When I was four or five,
I used to ask Mother as she churned the butter:
“What color were Abel's eyes?
Was Cain fat or thin?”
But Mother always turned her head away;
She would gaze at our flocks of sheep,
At our fields of wheat,
And say nothing.
Father would take me aside:
“Do not ask Mother these questions, son.”
He would press me to his side and hold me tight,
Turning his head away, gaze at our flocks of sheep,
At our fields of wheat.
But now I am thirteen. At night,
When my parents think I am asleep,
And Mother’s black shawl covers the sky,
And Father’s silence flows into the stars,
I hear their voices outside my tent
Recall the name
“Abel.” “Abel.”
Never Cain.
But I too have secrets.
For night after night I hear,
As Mother cries,
As Father sighs,
The whisperings of the ghost of my brother,
Abel;
The rustlings of the skeleton of my brother,
Cain.
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