I know, I know,
it’s the oldest defense in the book:
I was only following orders.
The shoddy rationale of every
garden-variety war criminal,
concentration camp commandant
or bookish man who only planned.
And in my case it’s a long shot;
but still, it’s true. He put it me up to it,
like a jealous older husband bent
on testing his young wife’s faithfulness
while she’s on a business trip,
hiring a handsome man to try
to pick her up in the hotel bar.
Told me it was just a harmless test.
He wanted to know if his daughter
was holding to her diet.
He had a vested interest in the health
of his future grandchildren, and all that.
In retrospect, it seems more than a little
weird. Well, actually control-freakish.
Weight-watcher-in-chief?
But at the time I didn’t question Him.
He created every one of us, after all.
I didn’t know He already harboured
us ill will, a fiery inbuilt brand
of jealousy. For Christ’s sake,
it was only a small piece of fruit!
How could I foresee the punishment
would be so wildly disproportionate?
Not just for the unlucky humans,
made to regret forever their weakness,
flung out of Eden, to go forward
always looking behind them
even from the start, and her kind
being set up for millennia of blame.
But oh my beautiful children!
Deformed to slither across the ground,
unloved, despised, all because of Him,
playing out a solipsistic trick
like some fusty, unlived, sadistic
British public school examiner:
prematurely old and loveless,
jealously robbing us of joy
when we had barely just begun.