Tag: Eden

Childhood should be our Eden, a time for innocence before the shadows come and we lament its loss.

This morning I’m enjoying my romp in Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West Poems, a collection of her prose poems, reminiscent in many ways of beloved Mary Oliver’s peace-conferring verse. Sullivan lived her childhood in Africa, the daughter of medical missionaries.

In one poem that means much to me, she shares her memory of untainted innocence that helps us recover our own dormant memories of a garden world we cannot enter again:

“Growing Up”

All I could think about
was filling these cups
and staining these lips and being some new kind of loveable. All the while, my mama in her quiet, weary way: one day, you’ll wish for this time without worry. No one can really ever warn you how the world is a thick leather boot. A midnight car slowing down. An oil spill. A matchstick.

I miss the girl my mother still could see— unadorned, untired. The one, at dusk, who followed the dog into the woods unafraid.

—rj