Tag Archives: Adam and Eve

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, ‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’

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it doesn’t mean two shlubs like you and me
would be in Eden with them. God knows I
am partial to a slice of apple pie
and grew up filching off a neighbor’s tree
the peaches he intended for his nieces.
How many generations would the ruse
have lasted? Theologians float their theses,
but sin’s a firecracker with a fuse

that heaven’s ghostly glow can light as well
as any spark that fountained out of hell.
Can’t speak for you, though I suspect I do,
I’d grow so bored, I’d climb the wall with you:
A derring-duo, deathlessness-defying,
we’d sneak out into all that lively dying.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “If Eve and Adam Never Fell” continues a long tradition for me. For a reason unknown to me, I have written obsessively for decades about the fall from the garden of Eden, in fact by sheer volume of work it comes in third behind the Ramayana story and the 1947 Partition of India among my recurrent themes. “Subtle Anatomy,” for example, is one of my first ever published poems, way back in 1999:

Subtle Anatomy
by Amit Majmudar

An arm is the spine of an angel wing,
cracked at the elbow. Webbed for gliding once,
we could leap off of cliff or bridge or tower
and saw no problem with a leap of faith.
What happened to it? Ask the suicide.
After the battle in heaven, the good angels,
precursors to the Turks who shamed their captives,
carved and carted off those wings—atrocious—
a mound of wings more chilling than a mound
of skulls: in this case, the contributors
could watch the ground tumor swell. So you see
we have some angel in us, even if
it’s the bedeviled kind, stripped of its wings
like a drunk pilot, out of service.

Before Eve met the serpent, she was fleshier
than even Rubens’s palette could stomach
and spineless, literally. The serpent
dove in her through the nest-hole anus
until the scorpion-stinger coccyx
slurped in too, and she sheathed him whole.
He straightened her, the breath in a balloon,
into this human posture of rebellion,
this upright and bipedal challenge.
Settled, the serpent sent nerves everywhere,
claiming each inch of her with senses.
Not with an apple but an apple’s taste
the serpent ruined her, fossilizing
to the vertebral column. So you see
we have some devil in us too
and dead center at that
commanding everything.

previously published in The Journal of the AMA

*****

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things My Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026). His forthcoming book is a novel, Cervantes in Chains (Slant Books, 2027).

‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’ was first published in The Sonneteer

Illustration: RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light

Helena Nelson, ‘The Fall (GM)’

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The tree was genetically modified.
The apple was full of dioxins.
The leaves were too green;
any fool could have seen
they were vibrant with millions of toxins.

A helpful old friend (we called him ‘The Snake’)
announced he’d go up there and get it.
I said to my spouse
‘We’ve got pears in the house’
but what did he do? Adam ate it.

He snaffled a bite with a smirk of delight,
then laughed till he cried (he was manic).
‘You’ll love it my dear,’
he said, ‘and look here—
I got you some seed. It’s organic.’

Well what could I say? It wasn’t my day
for dodging his amorous athletics.
It led to sheer babel
from wee Cain and Abel—
I blame the whole thing on genetics.

*****

Helena Nelson writes: “I wrote it more than twenty years ago, and at the time people were going on endlessly about GM foods and the risks thereof. They seem to be worrying about other things these days. Anyway, this was the result, and I’ve always liked it, although it is very silly. Maybe too silly.”

Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.

Photo: “Everyone’s pregnant in the Garden of Eden!” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Blank verse: Gail White, ‘Eve Discusses Adam’s First Wife’

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You tell me Lilith has become a fiend,
a vampire, a screech-owl, one who preys
on children (I‘ve had three and she has none),
sentenced for disobedience to run wild,
hideous now, howling for all she lost.
You tell me I was taken from your side
that I might always find a refuge there,
a warm and nestling creature like the cat,
safe from the free but haunted world of dark.
And I’ve adjusted splendidly, I think.
My apple fritters are the best you’ll eat,
go where you will.  I keep domestic life
tidy and clean.  I never stir abroad
for fear of Lilith’s shriek and bat-like wings.
Yet when our first son killed our second son,
I – the good mother and obedient wife –
had one quick moment’s envy of her life.

*****

Gail White writes: “You won’t find the story of Lilith in Genesis, but in later Jewish commentary.  She was created simultaneously with Adam – God made them out of mud – and she used this joint creation to claim equality with him.  The world was not ready for Lilith as First Feminist.  She was banished, and Eve was created within Eden and presumed to be more docile.  I tried to give her a little flash of independent thought.”

First published in Blue Unicorn.  

Gail White lives in the Louisiana bayou country with her husband and cats.  Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is available on Amazon, along with her books Asperity Street and Catechism.  She appears in a number of anthologies, including two Pocket Poetry chapbooks and Nasty Women Poets.  She enjoys being a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine.  Her dream is to live in Oxfordshire, but failing that, almost any place in Western Europe would do.

Photo: “Adam and Eve (and Lilith, the serpent) (Notre Dame, Paris, France)” by runintherain is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Brian Allgar, ‘Genesis’

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One sunny morning, strolling in my garden,
I stumbled, and my foot crushed something’s head.
“Me dammit!” I exclaimed, “I beg your pardon”,
Looked down, and saw my Serpent lying dead.
 
Now this was most vexatious, for I’d planned
That this poor snake would implement my scheme
To give my little friends a helping hand,
And lead them gently from their childish dream.
 
The Serpent was supposed to tempt the couple
With luscious fruit that Eden’s trees bedecks;
My chosen agent, sinuous and supple,
Would lead the pair to knowledge – and to sex.
 
Omniscience can have its limitations,
And even Godly schemes may gang agley.
I’d once envisaged teeming populations,
But this, perhaps, was better, in its way.
 
No Spanish Inquisition, no Crusades,
No slaves, and no Industrial Revolution,
No mining sites where once were leafy glades,
No factory chimneys belching out pollution.
 
No nation-states, no border wars to settle,
No Holocaust, no tribal genocide,
No Rap, no Hip-Hop, Punk or Heavy Metal,
No hamburgers with coleslaw on the side.
 
No guns, no bullets, no demented shooters,
Since nothing could be made, except of wood;
No mobile phones (thank Me!) and no computers …
I looked on all of this, and found it good.
 
Yet what of those who should have lived hereafter?
No Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart, Botticelli?
No P. G. Wodehouse? (I was fond of laughter,
Though, being God, I didn’t have a belly).
 
Descendants all, but only if they had ’em.
(No Michelangelo, no Sistine Chapel?)
My mind made up, I called to Eve and Adam:
“I wondered if you’d care to try an apple?”

*****

Brian Allgar writes: “As a devout atheist, I felt it my duty to shed some light on the truth behind the Creation myth.”

Brian Allgar was born a mere 22 months before Adolf Hitler committed suicide, although no causal connection between the two events has ever been firmly established. Despite having lived in Paris since 1982, he remains immutably English. He started entering humorous competitions in 1967, but took a 35-year break, finally re-emerging in 2011 as a kind of Rip Van Winkle of the literary competition world. He also drinks malt whisky and writes music, which may explain his fondness for Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

He is the author of “The Ayterzedd: A Bestiary of (mostly) Alien Beings” and “An Answer from the Past, being the story of Rasselas and Figaro”, both available from Kelsay Books and Amazon.

Photo: “Mary’s Feet” by elycefeliz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.