Lillith's Apology to Eve- Julia DaSilva

Lilith’s Apology to Eve

There is a world where I leapt over the garden gates with Satan on my heels, and reached you frst. There is a world where I climbed the forbidden tree and you dropped your basket of fresh fowers like Adam might have dropped a spring garland —your crown— when he learned you ate the fruit. But this defowering only freed your arms to reach for mine, and where the serpent might have slipped you a bite or two of apple I brought armfuls of satanic peaches and kissed the juice from your lips. There is a world where we looked back at the shared fesh of our regret, where he paused at the edge of the lake he told us would do for a sky— and we climbed skyward outward back over the garden wall, to laugh as he tasted the fruit we left as if it would work for him. There is a world where your eyes met mine and you found what you thought you’d lost the morning you saw refected in the pool what you never saw in your other half—and submitted to being but half of your paradise. There is a world where we are whole with the knowledge of our reality.

Julia DaSilva

There is a world, now where my life is strung between the moments you are folded in my arms, where May fowers raise their heads at our embrace, forgetting the Jupiters above who would impregnate the clouds. For spring is over and summer has brought us out of Eden.

But there is no world, love, not yet, where Adam did not meet us frst. Where he does not spit chewed apple pulped with bitterness on our garden, like we fed it to him and not to each other. I wish there was a world where I was the one on the green bank to say when you woke, “That was only your shadow.” I’m sorry it took me so long to fnd you.

And without that world this is the world, where we twine our tresses and manly grace and wisdom and submit to fghting Eden’s attempts to take us back.