Eden #2 Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The coldness runs too deep,
Even if the weightless scientists discovered
A new planet with budding life on it,
Abound in rich gardens still standing,
Two brothers in love and weaponless,
A place where death never touches the sad corners,
Where prostitutes never hunger and the winged
Serpent was denied and left early,
Where the forbidden fruit still hangs forbidden,
Gladdened on the ripe branch, even still in reach,
Where the innocent fleshes
Of those distant ancients are nubile and sinless,
Still clothed in fig leaves and Lilly pads, with
The open fornications in the tranquil gardens,
Between the lions and the lambs who gambol in
The yellowing fields where the winds blow warmly,
Here where the pastoral boarders expand with
The holy procreations of cousins, where there is
Only one age, and ageless, in the green space
Where throats sing praises to the fecundity of
Angels swimming in the trees, and God still
Visits every Sunday to read to his great flock
From his glowing book, where there is not space
Enough for gravestones, the unnecessary markers of
Sin never to be perceived, here where a thousand years
Is still infantile, where thoughts grow in
Temples like glistening chalices upon which the
Untarnished souls sustain and the knowledge received
Is given to all daily in little bits, breadcrumbs that fall
Down from the clouds like manna softly bumping onto
Those gentle heads,
And the goodness continues on and on
In glowing, manicured waves.

Yet, not for us— We can not climb aboard the rocket
Built to take us to their second paradise, we who have tasted from
Her drunken lips, our Eve bedded with the Serpent,
Creating the dark places of burn and rust, the pallid
Coffins in which we live, and though, ashamed, she
Left him to come back to us, and we forgave,
That first coldness remains and runs deep, forever
Lining our boarders with the hoarfrost of her eyes, shivering
As we stand at the entrance to our once fair garden
Where God’s burning sword defends eternal,
The half eaten fruit still rotting near the place she fell,
So even if we were to sneak back in, either here
Or 20 light years away into that undestroyed paradise,
Illuminate and gentled, we could not escape, for the
Bittersweet taste of knowledge is still choking our throats,
And the coldness of our sin burns forever colder inside
Our dislocated bones.