It’s easy to think that God grew jealous,
seeing Eve love Adam and Adam love Eve,
no longer needing Him. He must’ve hated their love
and newly-formed bodies entwined, writhing in grass
that was also perfect and plush and green −
He probably hated it, too, closer than He to His creation
lost to the glow of the garden
and its bountiful flow of juice-laden fruit.
Or maybe I just like to think of God as jealous,
because jealousy demands the breath of humanity
and my favorite gods are human gods:
Grecians pursuing petty quarrels,
nameless gods who sleep on lonely park benches
in the stretching afternoon shade,
and the Eastern gods who are more human
even than us, holding two or three or four souls in one
chthonian body, magnificent.
Even Jesus of Nazareth was great
not because he was god, but because he was human:
he splintered his palms cutting wood as a child
and felt the soft sponge of dirt underfoot
as he walked desert paths in high afternoon sun.
His story becomes worth so much more
when you can grasp his humanity,
hold it in your cupped hands and feel its weight.
I wonder what he thought
in those last delicate moments,
what childhood morning he recalled
when the scent of freshly-cut dogwood
filled his nose in the day’s bright third hour.