Eden's Garden

Life’s goal, if there is one,

is to return to whence we came,

not dust to dust, ashes to ashes,

or some form of life from which we evolved

perhaps years ago, eons ago from

a single cell that emerged from

ocean depths to spawn shamefully on terra firma,

but it is to return to Eden’s Garden,

mystical roots of a creation story,

Adam and Eve, naked, shameless then,

and blameless, bare limbs and breasts,

exploring life’s pleasures freely,

in wonder of each other and self,

time not a clock with piercing alarm

reminding where and when to be, or who,

but a rising and setting of the sun and moon

signaling nothing more than light and dark

and hours passed in between, hours passed hand

in hand, upright, unimpeded

through grassy bowers and glades

shaded by trees but a few

days old, or billions of years,

where age and origin mattered little;

And Adam and Eve, upright,

hand in hand, naked and shameless, blameless,

roamed Eden’s Garden, a borderless

garden lacking white picket fence

or stone walls that separate and confine,

that define our space, your space and mine,

bordered and hemmed in; just Adam and Eve

through a garden roaming, naming the un-named

nameless in a language not English, French,

Latin or Greek or Germanic, no one’s native tongue,

perhaps even a language not yet spoken,

but understood by two, each a part of the

other, from Adam’s rib, from the dust

of earth’s new formed crust, dust and ash

to mud to man and woman, taken from man,

creation unconcerned with cause or process,

creation content only with being.

To Eden’s garden returning, gateless now,

gates long torn down, Satan’s Serpent

cast to the ground and ground under foot,

an object of wonder and study, no longer

a voice tempting woman to eat, to share her sin,

for knowledge’s tree long ago outgrew

itself, rotted, decomposed, earth to earth

returned, crushed to humus, all god-given

restrictions lifted, for all knowledge,

all truth, was learned, not there, but

in the expulsion and in the journey back

to Eden, to the truth, blameless,

naked and unashamed, hand in hand --

creation’s mystical roots, Eden’s Garden,

is but the goal of life.