After Abel’s blood ran off down its throat
the earth writhed away from Cain’s hand, curling
in shame from his foot, his tools, his fingers.
It asked for the sun’s drought, for the downpour,
it begged to be clogged with stones or with clay,
to become useless loam, relinquished ground.
Cain tried to cajole and flatter the soil
but it only sank further from his words,
each season erasing all he had learned.
The grass wouldn’t even become his bed
so that he looked for sleep in the mountains
and gave his body so wholly to stone
that cities sprang from his endless exile:
the home, the street, the building and the wall,
the crowd, the commerce and every contest
of skill and strength only meant to mimic
the work and study that the ground deserved:
the round year, fickle weather, and the brutal
yearly hazard of flood or starvation –
and Cain made the city to distract:
so here’s security, here’s music, here’s war,
here’s the smith, here’s smoke and achievement,
here are the poet’s pale imitations.
But he was never convinced, never forgot
the God who was too young to understand
the totality of his creation,
and Cain, too new and confused to discern
the puzzle of God, the force of passion,
and his addiction to the growing earth,
the full mad fever of the first farmer.
No more evil than Abel was pious,
the soil only accepted Cain when he
was lowered as a corpse into the clay.
Nothing grew on that hill, no wanderers
or animals ever stopped there for shade,
but still a buzzing dissatisfied hum
seemed to hover and linger on the spot:
Cain and his desperation, his questions,
God and his questions, his desperation.
Tim Miller‘s poetry and essays have appeared in Parabola, The Wisdom Daily, Jewish Literary Journal, Crannog, Southword, Londongrip, Poethead, and others across the US and UK. Two recent books include Bone Antler Stone (poetry, The High Window Press) and the long narrative poem To the House of the Sun (S4N Books).
