All The News Is Bad Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

The serpent fell out of the tree - stone dead
Making one last pronouncement to the pair
Before it bit the dust in paradise
‘You're on your own now - orphans from Nature'.

"The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
From Eden took their solitary way".

And so they bid farewell to happy climes
And temperate sunlit clear and healthy morns
Stepping over the very body of good and evil
Glozed by their own proem to perpetual torment.

And all that ensued was endless futile bickering:
That they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but never self-condemning,
And of their fatuous prattle there was no ceasing.