Eden's Disaster Poem by L MILTON HANKINS

If I pretend, for just a few minutes,
Everything happened like it says in Genesis
I will tell myself God was not always good
He could, in fact, be sometimes malicious.

A paradisiacal garden our good God plants
With a stupendously enticing but forbidden tree
Laden with fruit his children were not to eat
Lest they die, they were told, as we soon see

But Adam and Eve knew nothing of death
Neither thought of dying's finality,
So, they ate the luscious mouth-watering fig
And death became the fate of humanity.

Does this seem the right thing for God to do?
To tempt his naïve, unassuming creature
Leaving us humans in death's firm grasp
Forever and ever … far into the future?