We came in through the undergrowth
To a patch of blasted trees,
Then checked the radiation that
Had brought earth to its knees,
The skyscrapers were gaunt and tall
They rose like a cankered cell,
Of shattered forms, all overgrown
With a **** spawned straight from hell.

Then Roach said that we should wait awhile,
Make sure it had stabilised,
We’d seen what happened to men before
When they glowed, before our eyes,
But that had been thirty years before,
When men had made mistakes,
We’d not seen a man since we began
Living on rats and snakes.

I vaguely recalled the woman thing
That had held me in her arms,
Who cooed and cried when the lightning died
And the bells shrieked in alarm,
But we hadn’t seen a woman thing
For years, for they all died out,
It was something to do with ovaries
And things we don’t know about.

We’d met as a pair of ragamuffins
Roaming over the plains,
Hiding under a hollow tree
To avoid the acid rains,
Our skin was scarred, and our life was hard
But we managed to survive,
And now, as far as we knew we were
The only men alive.

I knew she’d read from the Bible for
That was a woman thing,
She taught me plenty of words back then
And showed me scribbling,
So I read fragments to Roach who said
He’d had something called a sis,
I had a piece of a Bible, torn
That was just called Genesis.

We smiled at the thought of a world that was
Quite empty, just as now,
But set in a fabulous garden with
A God, we’d find somehow,
And in there was the name of a man
My woman thing gave to me,
And while he slept, the God man kept
A rib, and he called it Eve.

The city that lay before us may
Have well been Babylon,
But silent now and deserted with
Its ancient people gone,
We wandered into its cluttered streets
And we saw the things of men,
All scaled with rust and a loss of trust
It would never come again.

It was there that we found a woman thing
Who was scarred, and scared as well,
For she’d never seen a man before
And thought that we’d come from hell,
She sat, backed into a corner,
And begging us both to leave,
But I said I was known as Adam, so
She must have been known as Eve.

And then that night, we had a fight
I committed a mortal sin,
I killed my friend as he went to bend
Over the woman thing,
And God roared out with his thunder,
I would always be to blame,
And then decreed in my hour of need
I would call my first son Cain.

David Lewis Paget