In the Dirt with Eve

There’s a lot to talk about in those very first stories. I am far less interested in the science of them than the blank space of humanness in them. 

(Genesis 1-4)

She holds the dirt

Before she throws it on the first grave,

And marvels how different

a First feels from a Last.

The look of a garden for the first time

And on the last step out.

The first look into a son’s eyes

The last look of his face as they cover him.

It’s like she is only a beginning

And an End.

Counted among the first

to see rain fall

trees rise

to dip her toes into the river,

testing if it held.

to believe the lie,

“You are only what you are not.”

the first in a long line of us

who did not want to fall alone.

To have the whispering voice in her ear

become the thundering noise in the clouds.

To have the wide world in front of her

become the dream behind her.

To see her own flesh

as something to hide.

The first body to know a man

 make a man,

 teach a man to walk

to watch him walk away.

And now the first to bury a man

whose eyes looked like her own.

She is the first in a body

to know the pain of the Voice:

We cannot love away

The appetites of our children.

It is the first and last truth she holds:

You can only be the mother of life

If you are ready to be the mother of death.

You only gain what you are ready to lose.

And all of it is love.