Non fiction

2 Genesis

Have we been here before? I ask to moulded ears
as we slow dance again for the first time in the garden,
in the beginning.
I remember the last time though this is the first,
but I do not remember your birth from my page,
when the word became flesh.

When did this begin? I ask to new lips:
soft apple kisses I remember, now ripened.
You let me pluck myself from Eden –
“Ladies first!” you said and followed like a lamb.
You were different yet
old and new as God and snow:
icy waters bonding our teeth into
pearly enigmas my language could not
master and divide
into two stanzas.

When did our Geneses fuse?
meet? press lips to a cup? share in one bread?
I ask to scrunched locks of strong hair, combed between my fingers.
Were you an ancient narrative
sewn into dreams I had in past sleeps,
when my words were prophesies unwritten?

Did you come of me or was I of you?
The Word and the Book.
I ask to my own eyes:
blinking mirrors without glass
where language knits the trinity
and I see my image reflected
in yours in mine in yours in mine.
Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh!

Mother of all living?

A rib jolts.

Lucy Smith