Eve In Her Garden ...

Eve in Her Garden in This Vale of Tears

Accursed be the soil because of you.

With suffering shall you get your food from it

every day of your life.

- Gen. 3:17

I spend a lot of time upon my knees

serving the earth.

I sow seeds in soil.

I arrange the roots of trees in rich peat moss.

Ising "sean-nös" in chorus with

vixens, donkeys, bees, hens,

children, ravens, cows...

I understand the why and wherefore of the worm's knot,

the warbling and the chuckling of birds.

Under my care

apples grow,

ears of oats turn blond,

hens go broody, cows seek the bull,

love puts down roots.

The drops on my brow

are sweated delight.

The child is worth the birth pang.

Life is worth its price.

I cancel out the curse of God,

defeat his greatest effort.

I grow posies of flowers

on the hobstone of hell.

Translated from the Irish by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

Translator's Note

I love Genesis poems. They are the ultimate tabula rasa. They give

the poet carte blanche to create the world anew. Lots of us have had

ideas about how to clean up the mess. We have all been arrogant

enough, at one time or another, to think God rather stupid. Now if

we were God, the world would be in a different state. Things would

be in much better shape, and so on and so forth. So when I opened

. Biddy Jenkinson's new book of poems, Oiche Bhealtaine, and came

across this poem, my heart leapt in my breast.

Except it is not strictly a Genesis poem. It is a post-Genesis poem.

Instead of wishing for the world anew, the poet gets on with what

we've got and makes it sacred too. A keen gardener, she takes upon

herself the stewardship of the earth, the lot of mankind since the loss

of Eden, and, instead of finding it a curse, she turns it into a blessing.

Life is worth its price. The child is worth the pangs of birth. The

sweat of her brow, by which she has been ordained to earn her bread,

has become the very joy (French feminist jouissance) of existence.

Death, where is thy sting? A life of conscious effort, imbued by a

sense of blessing for the very fact of existence, makes a mockery of

the curse of God - "For dust thou art /And to dust thou shall return."

For what if being dust were a felicity in itself? A part of the natural

round of being, the (not necessarily Disney) greater circle of life. Down

on our knees in the dust where we belong, we can make the earth

flower, the dust itself break into verdant blossom.

According to this philosophy, even a poem may resound in the

abyss of emptiness. A poem of such inherent benevolence in a minority

language such as Irish challenges the erasure of memory and mocks

the trauma of colonization and alienation. Even if we are put out of

the original garden, so what! We can recreate it with pleasure and

gusto. This is why I love this simple poem so much. It enshrines a

view of life that goes far beyond the contemporary fashion of victim-

hood. It encourages us not only to "gather ye rosebuds" but also to

plant them. - N.Ni.Dh.