How happy was our golden age, our
prim befruited tree and leafy bits,
our prelapsarian gay days, we danced
for the sheer joy of it, our music
of the wind or of the spheres–it was the
only time we could be said to gambol.
We made feasts of fruit and salad, or
engaged in innocent converse or play
in our luminescent pond. Likewise
the deer and massive cats reposed in
peaceful pairs, tender and robust at once.
We were guileless, desirous only of
more sun, perhaps, and less poison ivy.
Nonetheless, what walled out wilderness
walled in our sleep at night–we dreamed of
calipers and caliphates, cannon, corsets,
meal and muslin, trains and trebuchet,
and all the made things that would unmake
our green idyll, our golden age.

image: Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Golden Age –http://www.wikiart.org/en/lucas-cranach-the-elder/the-golden-age-1530