Echoes of Eden

I’ve wanted to write this poem for some weeks now, but of course, as is usual with such longings, the poem itself seems to have had other ideas than those I had intended. I really think its judgment was better than mine. The hints of Eden, and thus Heaven’s Kingdom, in this world are there, at least for me. Even the wind whirling outside as I write seems to portend change in some fundamentally eternal way. So, rather than writing about Christ and his restoring of humanity to Paradise via His incarnation, death and resurrection, I ended up writing about how we are all haunted by some fuller kind of humanity. I do believe we are all, every one of us, haunted, perhaps even hounded, by some true way of being that eludes us. This often comes out in our wish for success or self-improvement, but we meet that haunting head-on when we know we’ve messed up and we didn’t have to. I express it as Eden here. You may express it differently. Anyway, there we have it, for whatever it’s worth. God willing, it’s worth something.

Echoes of Eden

Once wonder was,

Once will unwedded to weeping,

Once life which lay like first light over all

With love as both its source and end.

Once naming was knowing,

True words made for true things,

No power of possession in them,

But dreams drawn from the very Being of being

To bring the world to drink at wisdom’s well.

Then came the day the namers named themselves,

Denying to spend what had been freely given,

Taking before time the thing that they were always meant to have,

Themselves trapped forever in themselves,

Now named anew by fear and broken freedom.

So selfhood sings its song down all the years,

Tears sowing salt within the human heart

Where Eden’s seed once had its place,

Planted long ago when new things, not yet named, still played

Amid unploughed plenty not parceled by pain.

Yet always the heart is haunted,

When the spring comes creeping, little by slowly,

To melt the winter’s might with mist-born mirth,

The green smell wetly waking it once more,

Softening it to silence amid a chorus of birds,

Letting it live for a time beyond mortality

To glimpse eternity in the deep and ancient echo of beginning.