Exodus - poem

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Millennia mount up and are we born older, each of us? Layering the narratives and styles, do we age? Here is the taut muscle of memory, it jerks and flexes in our sleep. Awakened, we are the empty theater, the barren-bellied stage.

Echoes thunder inside us. There have been cataclysms, children, and storms without rain. Of its own magnetic will, the pen avoids its page. (Even the name avoids its thing.) Put your ear to me. What do you hear?

Remember: grave-robbers came and stole our bracelets, silver miners came and stole our grandfather's rings. They took them off his fingers.

We stay quiet when we sing, avoid the unseen hand, practice the shibboleths of our foreign land, and drive all night through fields of wheat and corn (so grain remains the same). Are we born older, each of us?

Here is the Nile, just as we left it. Here are the books, boiled in war. Here are the fields we strode towards exile. We saw strong shy faces, signifying farms. (Walk on.)

Tremendous trees, above our heads, bear rain storms and we, so small to them, and sheltered, keep moving; migrating from nightingales to larks, from death to life, and ever on from darkness into day, and back through dark. (Why is it sacred?) Because it is that way.

Jennifer Michael Hecht received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1995 and is a Professor of History at Nassau Community College, where she specializes in the History of Science. Her recent publications include poetry in The Partisan Review and feature articles in French Historical Studies and the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.