Mind The Gap

My name is Eve, though not baptised.
Listeners, therein the injustice lies.
Not six weeks old when I would not wake
and now I pay dear for my namesake’s mistake.
She, the purveyor of original sin
as she bit into the apple’s ripe rosy skin.

Today should have been my christening tea,
Instead my family are burying me.
Laid to rest in a pure white dress,
an innocent angel they all acquiesce.
This angel though, she fell through the gap,
displaced from heaven and caught in a trap.

Above the cosmos I met a man named Peter
who introduced himself as the celestial gatekeeper.
With snowy beard and sumptuous vestments
he examined my soul in earnest assessment.
“I cannot give you passage, my child,
though your life on Earth was meek and mild.”

“Upon your soul there is a blight,
my sympathy for your blameless plight.
Holy water would have granted absolution
but as you didn’t receive this sacred ablution
there is naught that I can do or say
Except bless you and wish you on your way.”

Thus I spiralled as a dandelion seed shuttlecock
back towards Earth’s dark black rock.
A drilling motion affording me entry
to an underworld with another sentry.
A dog serpent chimera dubbed Cerberus
his glowing coalish eyes like crimson gerberas.

A guttural voice, half snarling, half sneer;
“Little girl, you have no right being here,
down amongst the sweaty suppurating heat
reserved for those who murder, blaspheme and cheat.
You are pure as the driven snow,
hurry, make your escape and go.”

“Go where?” my pleas fall on deaf ears.
A dawning realisation of all of my fears.
By a quirk of Catholic catechism
my being is in cataclysm;
like an astronaut divorced from his tether -
Drifting in limbo forever and ever.