![]() The poem starts with the title, which flows with unbroken syntax into the first line: “After the fig leaves, Eve cuts her hair so when they bury Abel, there is no veil between her grief and her love.” The cutting of hair in response to death in the immediate family is a ritual practiced by women in many Native American tribes and Aboriginal people groups, where the act of severing, and the subsequent absence of, a cherished part of your self serves as a stark physical reminder of your loss. This is the first human death in the Bible, and it was the direct result of sin. Genesis 4:1–16 recounts how Abel was murdered by his older brother, Cain, in a fit of jealousy. LeighAnna Schesser’s poem “After the Fig Leaves, Eve Cuts Her Hair” explores parental grief following the death of a child-in particular, that of our primordial parents, Adam and Eve, who mourn the loss of their second-born son, Abel. The poem will appear in Schesser’s first full-length poetry collection, Struck Dumb with Singing, to be published by Lambing Press in May 2020. “After the Fig Leaves, Eve Cuts Her Hair” by LeighAnna Schesser was originally published in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry 2018 and is used here by permission of the author. There will yet be other sons, and daughters more Her voiceless throat swells tight, dry as scales. Loss escapes her in a hissĭespite that it was life she’d sent into the world. Cain made two tiny fists.Ībel she cannot unsee as a splintered spear They faced the barren, muddied vale together. Their fields withered and arrows flew fruitless.ĭull-eyed by the empty fire, beside the windless cedars, Once, when Cain was the only child in the world, ![]() Round and clear, apple-red, above the dark tree line. He named them, once, and now she names him:įather unfathered, sonless, one son less. She calls each animal he resembles: mole, badger, fox. Leaving plough and shovel, the sharp edgesĪnd the heavy handles, apart in furrowed field. His father cuts open earth with bare hands, So like his father, his cities yet unbuilt. “After the Fig Leaves, Eve Cuts Her Hair”īetween her grief and her love. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905), The First Mourning, 1888.
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