SATAN

Would that the story had ended here with recorded bliss eternal,

With generations of perfect wise children gently ruling the world,

When a crafty creature slid into the garden, a serpent of old,

Venomous and veiled, dressed in deception and dark guile.

God’s adversary, Lucifer, the morning star, son of the dawn,

Who said in his heart, “I will ascend to heaven; 

I will raise my throne above the stars of God, 

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; 

I will make myself like the Most High,”

No less than the devil made bold to enter Eden’s garden.

Ordained as a guardian cherub to stand on the sea of glass,

The fiery stones and flashing gems before God’s holy throne;

Anointed God’s lieutenant, an archangel to lead angel legions

In the worship of the Almighty, covering over the throne of God

With outstretched wings, 

Lucifer conspired to usurp God’s sovereignty,

And was expelled from His presence.

Once favored in heaven,

The future accuser of the saints, 

Satan, 

Was banished from heaven 

And cast down to earth

In disgrace, 

Together with a third of his proud, rebellious satraps —

Hurled out of a holy heaven like lightning falling to earth.

Sealed with perfection, in beauty perfect and full of wisdom,

Satan exchanged verity for vanity, bartered humility for pride;

Choosing darkness over light, deception over truth,

The devil became self-absorbed in his own beauty,

Embracing the emptiness of folly self-deceived.

Like a toad he puffed up in knowledge,

Like a red giant he expanded hot gas,

Inflated and tenuous at the edges,

He twisted inwardly in jealousy;

Self-consumed by a corroding discontent,

Corrupted by gazing at his own splendor,

And by thieving God’s glory, he collapsed

Like an imploding black hole sucking light.

Bejeweled with every precious stone: 

Ruby, topaz, and diamond; 

Beryl, onyx, and jasper; 

Lapis lazuli, turquoise, and emerald;

Adorned with exquisite gold craft

Of clasps and crowns,

He was blameless in all ways,

Until a wicked seed rooted in him 

And bloomed into good’s antithesis:

Demonic evil.

Without an independent existence, 

Dependent on God’s good will,

Unwilling to repent, 

Unable to ask forgiveness, 

Incapable of love,

Grasping at the power and authority to corrupt and destroy,

He devolved into God’s mimicking, parodying, satirical ape.

Addressing the woman, this ghoul aimed a poisoned probe

At innocence, injecting the first doubt to undermine truth,

A lie inserted between the permission and the prohibition:

“Did God really say

You must not eat of any tree in the garden?”

How clever the lie – casting doubt on God’s Word

By painting the Maker as a dour and sour prohibitionist

Fixed against the pursuit of all pleasure and happiness.

Rising to truth’s defense, 

Having received God’s command

Second hand from her husband Adam,

Eve parried the lie and denied the doubt,

Ascribing to God her own safety measure 

As a protective hedge.

Eve replied to the serpent,

“We may eat fruit 

From the trees in the garden, 

But God did say,

‘You must not eat fruit from the tree 

That is in the middle of the garden, 

And you must not touch it, 

Or you will die.’ ”

Fast as an adder, 

The serpent saw his opening

And sunk in his fangs,

“You will not certainly die. 

For God knows

That when you eat from it 

Your eyes will be opened, 

And you will be like God, 

Knowing good and evil.”

To be like God, knowing good and evil, knowing everything in creation,

To grasp power gained through knowledge, power over life and death,

To rise from subordination, to perceive secrets and receive adulation!

She could feel the poison flush her veins, rush through her arteries,

The hook implanted in her heart, temptation conceiving desires,

Coveting what was denied, calculating ways to quench craving.

Inseminated by a longing to converse with God as His equal,

A seed of dissatisfaction impregnated and grew in her belly;

Her eyes glowed and she saw how delicious the fruit looked:

Red and shiny on the outside, white and juicy on the inside,

Smooth to the touch, satisfying eyes, hefty in the hand,

With a sweet and sharp smell redolent of longings,

Desirable for gaining wisdom and good for food;

It seemed to be inviting her to taste and eat.

To be like God, knowing good and evil!

As soon as I bit into the forbidden fruit, 

The sweetness soured

And I understood why God 

Had forbidden us to eat from it.

I saw a leaf fall, twirling down a tree,

I saw a fledgling fall, fallen from its nest,

I saw a tree fall, crashing through the forest.

A hush fell on the garden, birds ceased singing,

Rooks massed in trees silently ruffling their wings,

Plumes of bats flew out of caves, out of the grass

The ground flowed with streams of hissing snakes,

Clouds gathered, the sun darkened red with blood,

The rose crown I wove on Adam’s brow grew thorns,

Blood covered my husband’s face like beads of sweat.

A sense of unease gripped me with fear and I swooned,

Nausea churning my belly and my limbs melting like wax.

An intense rush of knowledge and power burst my brain,

Exploding in dizzying visions and hallucinatory illusions.

Dark matter, dark energy, dark blistered my thoughts,

And I saw creation torn away from blissful innocence

And be subjected to violence, to betrayal and loss.

I heard the created order groaning in contortions,

Burdened by growing doubt and a fragile hope,

Precarious and frail in the face of rampant evil.

Swallowed the first bitter bite of forbidden fruit,

The foundation of fundamental reality shifted

Imperceptibly and all was changed in a flash,

Synapses snapping with new neural sparks.

At a loud trumpet blast, in the blink of an eye,

A drop of water, my tear, fell, and I fell with it

Through layers of matter, molecules, and atoms.

The spaces between solids foamed; unsubstantial

Substance quivered electric into quicksilver globules,

Shapes shifting into evanescent elementary particles,

All dancing with shimmering veils of vibrating waves,

Circling a dizzying symmetrical mirror of anti-matter.

Solid objects melted before my eyes and I trembled

With fear at the fragile uncertainty of the universe;

It was all an illusion, a trick of the eye, a mirage

So real I saw and touched its explosive power.

My mind’s eye saw heavy hydrogen particles,

The most basic matter energized with power,

Tritium isotopes charged with a flash half life,

Colliding in fission and fusion chain reactions

Triggering a sun-born thermonuclear explosion

Unfolding in Trinity the unbound power of stars

On a journey of death to extinction with no stop.

Hold my battered heart, world shattering death,

Comfort my crushed heart, destroyer of worlds, 

Cradle my fearful heart, cruel god of expiring life,

Blind me with a light flash brighter than lightning,

With a golden flower more searing than the sun;

Deafen me with a thundering, a percussive roar;

And a cloud like a mushroom rose to the heavens,

And a fireball hotter than the sun vaporized all life,

And a great wind leveled trees and smashed rocks,

And a cloud rained wormwood on land and waters,

And the scorched earth howled with winds of loss,

And the blackened earth shook with devastation,

And the shattered earth trembled cold oblivion.

I remember screaming but no sound came out;

Whirling down a tunnel shimmering with energy,

Emerging tumbling and floating into dark silence;

Sensations of streaking through star-filled space,

An asteroid hurtling in a trajectory round the sun,

A comet spinning past planets and solar systems,

Past millions of wheeling galaxies, dusty nebulae

Clouding the birth of suns, incubating in furnaces

Roaring silently with pulsing rays of light and heat

Tuned to the cosmic hum from a cataclysmic birth;

Soaring above a planet convulsing with volcanoes,

Tectonic plates colliding in shattering earthquakes,

Continents drifting on a sea of fiery, molten magma,

Mountains rising and rifts sinking into cracked faults;

Polar ice caps extending albedo snow to the equator,

Vast crust-crushing ice sheets blanketing continents,

Wave-damping white ice pack shrouding over oceans,

Glaciers grinding mountains down, scouring up valleys, 

Gouging out cirques and tarns, trailing till and moraines;

White rapids carving out canyons, brown floods cresting 

Over river banks, black mudflows and lahars burying all; 

Spiraling hurricanes like wind galaxies smashing trees,

Spinning off tornadoes and water spouts in their path;

Mountains igniting on fire, infernos consuming forests,

Skies filling thick with acrid smoke and seas with filth;

Forests petrified into coal and animals reduced to oil,

Toxic fumes emanating from hellish, sulfurous pools;

Oceans with no land in sight, deserts with no water

Stretched out to horizons featureless, empty, stark.

I saw our planet’s smallness glowing in dark space,

Lit by a roaring furnace of hydrogen in a dying star,

Eclipsed by the moon casting silver ghost shadows,

Edging diamond coronas round the darkening sun,

Circumscribing fractal, elliptical, low orbit rosettas

Sliding down the bend of gravitational space-time,

Bending through the gravitational lens of galaxies,

Riding the growling waves of colliding black holes

Devouring vast interstellar clouds of gas and dust.

Falling down wormholes into fantastic dimensions,

Fleeing superlumic quasars blasting gamma rays,

Plasma jets beaming death across the universe,

Cosmic waves irradiating my consciousness,

I beheld a parallel universe become reality,

I beheld a perfect paradise edge eccentric,

I beheld a creation that had lost its balance

And was wobbling with a slight precession and tilt.

The perpetual equinox, equal at the ecliptic and equator,

Shifted and tilted at an angle to the axis of the sun’s meridian,

Stretching seasons, shrinking days, and lengthening long nights.

I saw time speeding with pitiless force inexorably across space;

Under the weight of entropy, time crumpled, bent and folded,

The constant infinitesimally diminishing with passing eons,

The universal undulating like an ocean of churning waves,

Time slowing and accelerating with no fixed point or line,

Days dilating and distilling by milli-seconds

Until a day shrank from a thousand years

To one rotation of a spinning top;

And a year contracted from eons

To one revolution against the sun.

I saw time past fade 

And time present blur 

And time future

Climb towards a distant, finite, 

Undefinable point;

What might have been in Eden

Was now an irrevocable past.

I saw a crow peck out dead eyes,

I saw pigs rooting for offal in trash,

I saw a dog pack bring down a doe,

I saw a lion kill and eat his own cubs,

I saw a cat torture a mouse for hours,

I saw an absolute reduced by relativity,

Existence disappear in fickle probability,

Splintering the essential fabric of reality,

Fissuring spiritual fire from material clay,

Dissolving solid mass in fluid interactions,

Pressuring cracked fractures and schisms

Of stress, anxiety, discouragement and fear

Collapsing into an abysmal pit of depression.

Spinning cycles of decay, corruption, and rust,

Seeding doubt in the interstices of uncertainty,

Increasing noise to signal ratios of information,

Masking truth with illusory veils of deception,

Revealing stochastic moves in seeming order,

Liquid life spasmed with Brownian twitches.

Serrated with red fanged tooth and claw,

Sparking an indomitable will for survival,

Predators ruled prey with a jungle law:

Sharks circled seals, pythons coiled, 

Bees drove out drones from the hive,

Wasps and hornets massacred bees,

Chimpanzees waged genocidal wars,

And vicious life led to random death. 

Germ bearing parasites like lice, tick,

Fleas, flies, midges, and mosquitoes

Infected men and women with bites,

Boiling blood with fevers and chills. 

Vectors of vermin, monkeys, or rats,

Diseased bats, pangolins, and pigs

Demolished, devastated populations

With pandemics of mysterious viruses

That only the immune and fit survived.

Bacteriophages targeted bacteria cells,

Mutant cancerous cells consumed flesh,

Cankers suppurated bark with oozing boils,

Tumors grew appendages like dangling fruit,

Molds released spores into musty, poisoned air,

Red tides bloomed death across lifeless waters,

Suicidal whale pods mass stranded on beaches,

Migrating lemming swarms catapulted off cliffs,

Zombie fungi infected ants with invasive death,

And carnivorous plants trapped flies in pitchers.

Changing climates cycled floods and droughts;

Harvests failed, savannas dried, forests burned,

Brush fires killed kangaroos, koalas, and cattle,

Famines wasted herds and flocks, lions starved.

I saw a proud man place a crown on his head,

Seeking to satiate selfish desires at all costs,

Scheming with greed to amass wealth,

Manipulating the heart to satisfy lust,

Lying to conceal a hidden crime,

Coveting another’s property,

Envying another’s position,

Eyes filled with gluttony,

Indulging indolence

And drunken sloth,

Then erupting with rage from a dissatisfied will.

The resistance of things mounted fell mutinies,

The rebellion against what should be intensified,

Injustices undermined integrity and lies dulled truth,

Frustrations inflamed with inertia and incompetence,

With failures of the flesh, with surprising vicissitudes,

With advancing age and gout, with a loss of passion,

With a loss of vision, with laughter and derision,

With irritating kin and disappointing friends,

With a final, futile, death decaying cadaver.

I saw demons dance in bacchanals of lust,

I saw epileptics writhe in mad paroxysms,

I saw the rise of queens and priestesses, 

A goddess adored and a slave abused,

A wife beaten and a harridan nagging,

A daughter raped by her lecherous father,

A whore deceiving and a vixen manipulating, both for gain,

A virgin girl bent into a crone afflicted by solitude and pain,

A widow evicted from her home begging for alms in the rain.

I saw a parade of human misery shuffling on history’s stage;

Denying God, embracing pleasure, abandoning love and light,

Huddled in hate, curdled by envy, all bitter with regret and rage,

Then staggering off cliffs of despair, forgotten in floods of death,

Swallowed by sulfurous fumes exhaled from the dark gates of hell,

Humankind joined demons in the burning pit of unending torment.

I saw a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet,

Crowned with twelve stars on her head and pregnant with child;

She was crying out in pain and contorted in the throes of labor.

A great red dragon with seven crowned heads and ten horns

Knocked out a third of heaven’s stars with his great scaled tail,

And stood before the woman with open jaw to devour her child.

A male child was born holding an iron scepter to rule the nations

But was taken up to heaven to sit at the right hand of God’s throne; 

I saw his mother fly on eagle wings to shelter in a desert monastery.

What did it all mean?

Then I saw a civil war break out in heaven;

Immortal beings clashed in mortal combat,

Darkness raged against a host of light,

But could not prevail.

I saw falls before the Fall; 

One long, fundamental fall,

A cosmic, cataclysmic fall;

Satan falling like lightning 

Out of heaven;

I saw mass extinctions of life,

The Great Dying of all species,

The Permian and Cretaceous,

Triassic, Jurassic, and Holocene,

Periods of flourishing and dying;

I saw the mass volcanic eruptions

Of the Siberian Traps;

Ancestral demiurges,  

Dragons and dinosaurs

Destroyed by an asteroid.

A slouching ape rose erect;

I saw hominids evolve from a

Missing link, splitting branches

Of the human family tree into

Neanderthal, Denisovan, and 

Cro-Magnon Homo Sapiens.

A beast emerged from the sea, 

A beast emerged from the earth;

A scarlet harlot riding the dragon, 

Glittering in gold, jewels, and pearls,

Covered in blasphemies against God,

Drunk with the blood of God’s people,

Sat on the waters and seven mountains

Of kings of cities and multitudes of peoples,

Brandishing a gold cup full and brimming over

With vile abominations and the filth of adulteries,

With a name written on her forehead: “Babylon the Great!

Mother of Prostitutes and the Abominations of the Earth!”

And I wept for having given birth to sin.

When Adam named me Eve, the hope of Life,

Hoping I would become Mother of all the living,

Breeding the races of men on the African plains,

I was filled with secret pride that I would be so honored,

But now filled with open shame for the curse I brought on men.

Could I have resisted? I could not help it, I had to taste one bite.

Could I have reasoned? Feelings and desires arose so quickly

My will power was overrun by a stampede of rationalizations.

Could I have repented? What would be the purpose of regret

For a deed already done with no hope of reversal or return?

My deficient will had defected from God’s good command

And injured with corruption the good nature God created.

A film of hardness came over me and calloused my heart

Like the nictitating membrane that shutters a reptilian eye.

Adam stood passively, his face wearing an unreadable mask.

Was he angry that I had not consulted him before my decision?

Was Adam also tempted to be like God, knowing good and evil?

Did he know I had done this deed to advance our common weal?

Why had he not slain the serpent dragon who had deceived us?

Was he also stricken with grave doubts about God’s goodness?

Why did he not defend God’s truth and so deliver us from evil?

Why had he not intervened to stop me yielding to temptation?

We could have been so happy together living in innocent bliss.

We both knew he would lose me unless he too shared my guilt,

So I gave him the fruit and he ate.

While I was deceived and sinned, Adam knew he was sinning

By willfully disobeying the one law commanded for us to keep.

Now equal in guilt, sharing our shame, parental partners of sin, 

Suffering anxious thoughts, we feared the consequence of sin:

Separation from our Creator in the chasm of an unforgiven sin.

Suddenly aware of our condition, exposed to the glare of truth,

Our eyes glowing brightly with preternatural knowledge,

Ashamed of our nakedness, afraid of being discovered, 

In fear of the condemnation awaiting our disobedience,

We sewed fig leaves and girdled our loins to cover guilt.

Then we heard the sound of God walking in the garden,

In the cool of the day, as was His habit to meet with us,

Moving like a rushing spirit-wind swiftly rustling leaves.

In panic, we quickly hid in a thicket of pandanus trees,

But God called out to us, His voice a thunder-whisper,

“Where are you?”

What a question! 

As if God couldn’t know where we were. 

But the question I realized was diagnostic,

Not geographical.

The all-knowing Creator was concerned, 

Wanting us to confess to Him our status,

To reveal our state and admit our need

As the first step of our cathartic therapy

If there was to be a hope for our healing.

So Adam answered from our hiding place,

“I heard the sound of You in the garden, 

And I was afraid because I was naked;      

So I hid myself.”

Adam’s crafty answer seemed sensible,

Acknowledging awareness of our state,

But God, seeing past the lie, responded 

With another piercing rhetorical probe:

“Who told you that you were naked? 

Have you eaten from the tree 

Of which I commanded you 

Not to eat?”

“The woman you gave me, 

She gave me to eat from the tree,”

Countered the craven coward, 

Pointing his finger at me.

The gall of that accursed man!

Blaming me and accusing God!

That insolent and arrogant man!

I should have shouted, 

“He let me do it, 

He never stopped me,”

But when God confronted me, 

“What is this you have done?”

I confessed my plea, 

“The serpent deceived me, 

And I ate.” 

I would have added, “the serpent You made,” 

But I bit my lip in shame at what I had become.  

A shaft of blame-shifting and responsibility’s abnegation

Replicating through shattered shards of the divine image

Compounded the guilt, shame, and loss of our original sin.

Like a mutated gene, a malignant cell, or a malevolent will,

Man’s first disobedience was transmitted down generations,

Reproduced, magnified and multiplied within every individual,

Soiling every aspect, affect, and action of our human nature.

The fig leaves we had sewed to cover our condition, fell off;

We stood alone, naked, awkward, abandoned, and afraid,

Guilty for our deeds, ashamed of what we had become,

We stood alone, apart, forlorn, with our eyes downcast;

Spoiled the beauty of holiness, righteousness stripped,

Conscience bent out of alignment, character in tatters,

The will deceived, the mind distorted, virtue diminished,

The flesh enslaved with a gradual erosion of moral fiber

Corrupting the deepest heart and tarnishing all thoughts

With an all-pervasive, incurable cancer of total depravity;

Human kind fell to evil and was lost to blameless paradise.

A great wind swept through the garden, swaying the trees 

With sighs of sadness, soughing laments of loss and trouble.

When the garden lost its flowers, greening in summer’s flush,

The serpent donned falcon feathers and robbed a pipit’s nest.

Disguised as a red brood parasite mimicking the cuckold’s eggs,

The devil artificially inseminated helminth ova into human clutch,

Infecting the woman’s seed with his own evil, viral, leeching spawn.

Camouflaged in full sight, we now heard the cuckoo’s babbling call,

“To hell with God!”

REFERENCES:

https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-dore/paradise-lost-5

Genesis 3

Isaiah 14:13

Ezekiel 28:11-19

Revelation 12

1 Timothy 2:13-14 NIV [13] For Adam was formed first, then Eve. [14] And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli

Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, 5:29 am 45 seconds as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was then the USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (now part of White Sands Missile Range)… The code name “Trinity” was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, inspired by the poetry of John Donne.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)

“Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God,” John Donne

“Plutonian Ode,” Allen Ginsburg

Bhagavad Gita

http://thediagonal.com/2011/07/26/atomic-poems-oppenheimer-ginsberg-and-linkin-park/