Genesis Revised - Richard Schiffman

[Larry Robinson]


Genesis Revised


In the beginning nada, zilch, zero, a clean slate;
then, you guessed it, something,
or let’s just say something or other
since nobody could say what sort of something it was
there being nobody around yet to work it out,
which was not just the waste of a mid-sized planet,
but wretchedly lonesome for everyone 
who hadn’t been born yet, not to mention terrifying
(as non existence is to the pre existent.)
So long story short, a bunch of carbon-based 
molecules linked up like letters in the alphabet soup 
of the primordial seas and started spelling out words, 
mostly nonsense, happening sheerly by accident 
on “La Chaim”, which in Hebrew is the toast “To Life!”
God, who at that time was still a teetotaler, 
read the inadvertent toast as a prayer. 
She straightaway set to work (That’s right SHE,
but you already knew that.) God being God,
however, she took her own sweet time—
roughly three billion years and change— 
to work out all the glitches and get her ducks, 
flowering plants, paramecium, cetaceans, pinnipeds, 
bipeds and so on in a row—at which point 
the whole bunch posed grinning for the Divine photo op. 
Everyone stood chummily arm to fin to trunk to wing—
everyone except the bipeds, who sat like sullen 
children somewhere beyond the picture frame, 
assembling all sorts of worrying devices 
with their opposable thumbs.
But that’s another story.

	- Richard Schiffman