Vegetarians before the fall,
we haven’t found much fruit, since.
Just dust, and some pain when the kids came,
and argument.
How wretched to have come to this—
remembering the morning of our youth
breaking perfect from the husk of night.
The walks on dewy grass with our Beloved,
holding his hand; trust and delight in every step.
Now it’s all work.
Still, there’s memory, and now, much later, this brutal assignment:
Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.
It would be easier to let this cup pass,
to hold as enough the tilling, the bread-baking,
the sheer slog of generation.
But this other thing, this fierce call gilds the cup,
draws forth dreams of wheat sheaves and fat cows,
turns a “not yet” into “what you will” and then,
just when we think we have it nailed, the reminder comes:
Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.
Who are we to cure, to raise, to cleanse, to cast out?
We of the thorns and thistles, serpent-beguiled, dusty and mortal.
[O to taste that fruit again, to know ourselves beloved.]
So Love becomes the guide and so the sick are visited,
the dead to life renewed, the lepers kissed, the demons banished
and all that fruit we thought we lost so long ago in paradise is
grown again and ripened in a place we thought a desert.
And the morning breaks as perfect as the first.
It always did; we never noticed.

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