Jacks and Lunes

I haven't written much poetry lately, but I'm feeling that draw to play with words like I used to play with jacks when I was a little girl. Do you remember that game? Throwing those silver spikes down and looking for patterns to emerge so you could ever-so-carefully pick them up by ones and twos and threes until they were all safe in your small, tight fist? There was no better feeling of triumph than to make it all the way through to the end without dropping a single jack!

Anyway, that's how I'm feeling about writing... slinging down words and hoping some cool patterns will emerge that will help me put it all together.

Yesterday at Poetic Asides Robert Lee Brewer posted his third poetic form challenge: the lune. (I went with the Collom lune version.) The phrase it will grow on you got stuck in my head while listening to an audio book and has come out in this poem about Adam and Eve and Sin. I cannot imagine how horrified Adam and Eve were once they realized what they had done... what having the knowledge of good and evil really meant.... to know evil is a terrible, terrible thing.

After the Fall

He told us:
It will grow on you
like baby soft

skin over a
skinned knee or beautiful moss
swaying in trees.

We were so
newly fallen and lost that
we didn’t understand

about pain or
parasites or anything else from
the Deep Evil.

It didn’t take
very long for us to
see that the

old Serpent was
nearly right in his words.
Sin became an

easy mantle to
wear, a comfortable bed on
which to sleep.

But he was
wrong, too – it not only
grew on us,

Sin consumed us,
body and soul, until we
did, indeed, die.

It seeped into
our bowels, our marrow, our
cells – permeating, absorbing –

until there was
not one thing left without
blemish, nothing pure.

We were steeped
in the Great Dark Knowing
and fed it

forward to our
babies and their babies and
all the rest.

Lies and murder,
hatred, jealousy, spite and anger –
Adam and I

birthed these into
the world the same as
Cain and Abel.

Now we watch
and wait for the One
promised, the One

Who will split
the Snake’s head open and
take off our

animal skins, then
place upon us the holy
robes of Righteousness.

I think I'll go buy some jacks and play with Mary today! Have a bloggy good day, friends! And I pray that you (and I!) lean today on the Woman's Seed who struck that old Serpent a death blow square on the head.