Origin Stories - Sarah Snyder

When God Listens To Eve

    When God Listens To Eve 
    by Sarah Snyder

    It's hard to be the beginning 
    the one pulled from a cage of ribs
    without the sweet smell of milk 
    or symbiosis of skin, 
    that's probably why he and I began 
    our cleaving, arriving already 
    long-limbed and flat bellied. 
    The only sanity would be to sleep 
    next to him, to reach and find 
     spaces in our darknesses under the stars. 
                             Both of us motherless. 
    I wander on the spongy soil 
    where there’s too much to harvest, 
    every tree humming 
    with wind and bird sound.
    Ferns unfurled and generous.
    And those leafy walls of scent: 
    lilac, jasmine and their shadows. 
    All the furred and winged animals
    seem indifferent and ornamental.
    I count the loud crows without number,
    follow their spiriting from branch to sky.
    And when I look beyond to the changing moon 
    barely there in blueness, 
    I am surrounded and uncertain.
    I need to know the world of same 
    that come from same. 
    A seed begets a tree, a tree its fruit.
    Every stone stays in a perfect place
    except the small, smooth ones I pick up.
                            Maker, the next time 
    you want to make yourself into flesh 
    and blood again, place us in a mother, 
    let us collapse into her arms 
    and know the watermark 
    of a child’s tears from birth.

    (first published in Birdcoat Quarterly & then in Now These Three Remain)

Origin Stories – When God Listens To Eve

I began this poem in a workshop with Marie Howe & Ellen Bass. In the session where this poem emerged, Marie Howe was going over what she had curated as “A Supposed Person” poems. It was a great push to dive into persona. I don’t know why Eve arrived inside me, but there she was. A leap happened when I realized that both she and Adam were motherless. How some of us have struggled with our mothers. How much Eve needed. All of that lead to diving into the Bible and realizing that though Eve has a lot of acreage in the mythology of origins and culpability, she is only mentioned by name four times. Four times! So, I felt like she needed more of a voice, and the poems have just kept coming.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder