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​Lilith~ By Kathleen Murphey

1/23/2019

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Do you know Genesis One?
The creation story where everything’s great?
Where God created humankind in God’s own image,
perfect and divine,
female and male,
male and female,
equal and entwined,
two beings of superior design.
 
To have dominion over the Earth
and all its flora and fauna.
But with each other,
love and tenderness,
sex and fruitfulness,
respect and oneness,
with each other and their creator.
 
But no one remembers Genesis One,
Adam and Eve are the famous ones.
Adam comes first,
then the Garden,
Next comes Eve,
taken from Adam,
a bit, a part, an afterthought,
or conceived of as inferior from the start?
Then along comes the Serpent,
and it all goes to hell.
 
Weak Eve eats the fruit,
and Wicked Eve gets Adam to eat it as well.
 
Banished from the Eden,
Eve gets the blame,
Original Sin and childbirth pain.
 
But what to do with Genesis One?
 
If Eve gets the blame in Genesis Two and Three,
Why not blame a woman for Genesis One?
 
So Lilith was born;
Lilith won’t subordinate herself to her mate.
And the keepers of stories turn Lilith into a monster
who lies with demons
because
a woman who won’t submit to her male
is a deviant whore.
 
And what better way to damn her to hell
than make her a nymphomaniac slut
who’d lie with demons
and be punished for such sin
with children who die upon being born?
 
So Lilith, the monster, the unfertile whore,
roams the night,
stealing children’s souls and men’s semen
in demonic revenge.
 
Guard yourselves against Lilith,
the story tellers warn: 
The Female from Genesis One is the ultimate
Femme Fatale
because the story tellers were male.


Author Bio:
Kathleen Murphey teaches English Department courses at Community College of Philadelphia. She has been reading and writing non-fiction about women's issues for years and has now discovered the joys of incorporating those ideas into fiction (both poetry and short stories).
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