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In the Garden Through the Eye of the Needle

In the Garden

By Stephen Mitchell

Eve bites into the fruit. Suddenly she realizes that she is naked.
She begins to cry.

The kindly serpent picks up a handkerchief, gives it to her.
"It's all right," he says. "The first moment is always the hardest."

"But I thought knowledge would be so wonderful," Eve says, sniffling.

"Knowledge?!" laughs the serpent. "This fruit is from the Tree of Life."

Through the Eye of the Needle

By Stephen Mitchell

The camel catches his breath, wipes the sweat from his brow. It was a tight squeeze, but he made it.

Lying back on the unbelievably lush grass, he remembers: all those years (how excruciating they were!) of fasting and one-pointed concentration, until finally he was thin enough: thaumaturgically thin, thread-thin, almost unrecognizable in his camelness: until the moment in front of the unblinking eye, when he put his front hooves together. Took one long last breath. Aimed. Dived.

The exception may prove the rule, but what proves the exception? "It is not that such things are possible," the camel thinks, smiling. "But such things are possible for me."

Stephen Mitchell, a writer, poet, and translator, has translated poems of Rilke and from the I Ching. He is the author of The Book of Job (1987), The Enfrightened Heart:An Anthology of Sacred Poetry (1989), and Parables and Portraits (1990) from which these two poems are excerpted with the permission of Harper Collins Publishers.