After the Gate

I did not rage when I left the garden.
Anger would have made it simpler.

I knew already that sweetness carries
its own edge.
The fruit had tasted of honey, yes,
but also of iron.

Once I believed the orchard
was the whole earth.

Branches arched over us
as if the sky itself were friendly.
Children laughed in that shade
and nothing in their voices
suggested the future.

It is difficult now
to remember how complete it felt.

But knowledge, once lit,
is like a lantern carried at dusk.
You cannot pretend the dark
has not changed.

The oil that feeds it
is drawn from the body itself—
from nerve, from marrow.

I ate.
And the world shifted.

Green deepened.
Distances opened.
The sky grew larger
than the garden could contain.

No angel drove me out.
No sword barred the path.

The gate stood open
like any door.

Still, the air beyond it
cut differently.

The soil was rougher.
The wind spoke plainly.

I understood then
that innocence survives only
where nothing has been questioned.

What I left behind
was not only a place.

It was the belief
that love requires blindness.

Outside the garden
the world widened.

With it came sorrow—
not as punishment
but as the cost of seeing farther.

Sometimes grief returns quietly,
like evening mist over an orchard.

I remember fruit
warm in my father’s hand.
I remember how easily
we trusted the day.

These memories are not lies.

They were a beginning.

Acceptance is not victory.
It is simply the moment
when a person feels the weather
on his bare skin

and understands
that open eyes have a price.

The child who lived in that garden
could not follow me here.

Yet affection remains.

I do not wish to return.
The orchard was beautiful
but incomplete.

Once the fruit is tasted
it alters the blood.

Its fire stays in the veins.

So I walk the rough fields now
without kneeling.

Exile is not only loss.

It is also ground
where a person stands
without illusion.

Knowledge wounded me.
But the wound
made space.

Now I carry grief
the way one carries a scar—
evidence
of having once loved deeply
while still asleep.

Sometimes in dreams
the orchard blooms again.
Children’s voices cross the dark.

Morning comes.
Salt remains on my lips.
The earth is firm beneath my feet.

The gate is somewhere behind me
in the mist.

I do not turn.

I walk.