Before the Song

 

 

Miriam, hastening onward, into it and through,
barely-dry sand hollowing underfoot, sometimes
a patch of gooey weeds sucking at her sandal,
and those shivering, glittering walls in view—
it feels like a dream she’s had but just remembered,
and fish, turning from the edge, like dream-thoughts
that flash by and are gone.

 

The held-back sea, somehow both still and moving—
it pulls her back to kneeling by the river:
little brother in a basket, how so much grief
washed her mind like the sound of rushing water,
then the shock of hope—the kindness of a woman,
an Egyptian princess, and all that followed.
Now she listens to the slosh and slap of waves
with some impatient booming in the depths,
and behind them, the faint whistling thrum
of the whirling cloud. She tries to draw it in—
too much to comprehend, all their long torment,
and innumerable trials still to come, and come—
yet for this night, here they are in the moment,
crossing from all that was to what will be,
from who they were to who they will become.
All this she feels, surging like the throttled sea,
thundering like what must be distant hoofbeats,
slicing like the shrieks of gulls, or is it the screams
of men and horses—feels it rising in her throat
and thudding out a rhythm in her core.

 

Now they all clamber up on shore, free at last,
as the sea shuts its jaws, and wailing wracks
the sky around them, then is gulped into silence.
This death of foes who were still humans too
and the quivering innocence of the drowned horses
too awful to dwell with, so they push it down,
brick it off from anything they know they know—
an iron stone kept buried in their packs.
All they can grasp then is the terrible wonder
of what they’ve come through, of the mighty God
that has made them his, and this triumph, triumph.
Miriam looks around her, moistens her salty lips.
Now let’s sing to him, she tells the women. Sing!