Nancy Scott McBride’s most recent poem to appear here was “The World Through a Window” (May 2020).

After the Fall
By Nancy Scott McBride

Why do we get so hung-up on the apple?
The apple and the snake, for Heaven’s sake.
They weren’t important, you know.|
Not really.
And it could have been something else.
Think about it.
For instance, God might have said,
“Don’t cross that river or don’t climb that hill,”
or don’t do any number of things we wanted to do.
The point is, He told us not to do something
but we did it anyway, and now here we are,
poisoning the planet and dying of the flu.