Son of Adam/mankind בנ אדם

I cry for you child,
and all your cries of pain
disguised in your laughter
disguised in your urbanity, your mockery, and your hate
Why must you hate so much?
Frail little child of Adam?
The father you say you never had
was like you---also---frail
He too---did, broke, sullied---and blamed
He too found too late he had given away his kingdom
to the snake
the deceiver, that leaves you in the end
a hollow man
In an empty lecture hall
Alone

The awards, the honorary dinners, the book signings,
an old man totters out of the lecture halls, the students gone before him
his theories old, his coworkers too busy for lunch or a chat
with a shooting star that was

Young new wolves take his place
state their new theories
Even more daring/shocking/irreverent
Displace his own

What did you give your life for?
Was it really worth it?
Why did you hate us so much?
Was it worth a life of fading degrees and intelligentsia jokes?

Adam was like you
He found himself, outside
The angel of wronged righteousness
flaming behind him with a lethal sword
Like you he found himself under a hard sun

He pulled the metal through the rocky unyielding earth
He sweated and ached to bring that bit of bread home
for the kids
He watched his kids destroy each other---him the beginner of his children's hate
He too found himself old, and childless

It was pain, and it was bitterness,
and there was no way back through the angel with the sword of flame

Did he also, like you, long for punishment?
Did he ever desire, to find it again?
I am my sons slayer
Worse I am the maker of my slayer son
My son
try to reenter , receive the righteous sword?

And yet---let that pain not become bitterness
Let that pain not become a snarling sore
for he found, at the end of things
A child in his worn destroyed hands
A child fresh as the first dawn over the eastern mountains
clean as a morning glory
"God gave him to us"
Seth, promise child
Born in a hard land, a hard world
A world of broken promises, and broken men
A world of pulverized dreams and sunbaked clay
A world of mothers crying in the dark of the night
For the son that was killed
and the son that is a killer
For fathers that lie awake in the quiet of the night
And regret and remember and turn in sharp movements
trying to relive a day with their childs eyes--when still childs eyes had been on him

Seth, promise child, came when all was foiled and so wrong
Chava's trembling hands reaching out, a mother again,
cradling her baby again
Adam, reaching out, with calloused hands, splintered rough torn hands
To the perfectly smooth brow of a new born child
Looking up at him with new born eyes

Child, child, Let not that pain turn to bitterness

Desert Height

Standing up on the desert world.
See the parched dust extend
far out, beyond world's bent
bend away, beneath a scorching sky.

It is a bare height here
A barren height,
outcropping of rock, desolate.
They tried to grow a tree here, once
there it is, wind blasted,
dust whipped,
Its twisted twig branches stretched out
dry.

The ragged wind catch my lungs
Blast my breath, catch my throat
dry my mouth with your dust
the sandpaper-dust of centuries

They say a man and woman, once
tried here to live
They had a garden here, but
Their hands could not take the wind
water ceased, crop failed, the deed was lost
long ago.

Dust of centuries, blasted by the burning sun
scorched beneath, miles and miles stretch
of centuries of centuries of dust
The waterless wind carries in far away
and scours the rock,
I breath the rasping raging wind
dry

Look! There, they are planting a tree
--but it is a killed tree
a dead tree, a death tree
planted to kill a man--
waterless wind blast his face,
on this barren height, this skull rock
The dust of centuries of centuries of centuries
hurl on their waterless rage, windblast, sandblast, heatblast,
scour, the living-dying man
on this barren rock.

I will open rivers on the bare heights,
make the wilderness a pool of water,
dry land springs of water

Opening at my feet, the rock heaves
apart, and there comes rushing up
a river,
a river of water.

For the rivers of God, are full
of water.