Moses

Do you dream of Egypt? Or seek traces
of your journey before God lays you down like Isaac
at Moriah and takes away your breathing?
Do you remember Sinai where you were sorely tried?
Or seek evidence that the lengthy sojourn
in Pharaoh’s court was not of your imagining?
Do you feel the sea tearing in half? Or remember
those who dared to flee into its breach?
Perhaps your feet still move in a desert rhythm
and will not stop even here on Mount Nebo
though you watch the others cross a river beyond you.
Haven’t you pleaded for your life? What have
you to say, Bush of Burning who is not consumed? Mountain
of the Stone Tablets? And you, Moses, do you lie back
upon your rocky bed, close your eyes and feel
the cool kiss of God upon your lips, your soul drawn
out of your body like a hair drawn out of milk,
sons dispersed like seeds, no burial place?

From “Lithuania: New & Selected Poems.” Myra Sklarew, professor emerita at American University, also is the author of “Harmless,” “If You Want to Live Forever” and the forthcoming “A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust and the Construction of Memory,” SUNY Press.