The Feast of Tabernacles

After the final meal hurriedly eaten

Behind doors spattered with lambsblood, sandals and staff

Ready for flight, the rising dough in bowls

Brought on the journey unbaked, the wailing children

Snatched from sleep and huddled into clothes;

After the keening grief when the Egyptians

Found their own children smothered in their beds

Too suddenly for sound, and then the chase

Across the desert to the Sea of Reeds;

After plunging, panicked, through the corridor

Of water impossibly sundered like a chasm

On either side, then seeing the chariots

Of Pharaoh’s army roll and disappear,

Shrieking horses and soldiers drowned alike

Under the crumpling walls: after all that,

They must have thought they saw the land of Canaan

Lushly shimmering in the middle distance

Just beyond the column of white smoke-

Never that the high drama of departure

Would be followed by forty years of tedium,

More than fourteen thousand evening meals cooked

And eaten, pots scoured and clothing scrubbed

With never enough water, by stooping women,

While dust and sand got into everything.

Manna, glazing the ground the first morning

Of exile like flakes of hoarfrost, celestial food

Tasting of honey and coriander seed,

Soon grew monotonous as a steady diet.

For Moses, the exclusive interviews

On Sinai punctuated weary years

Of settling quarrels, hearing footsore stragglers

Ask again if they were almost there,

Or grumble resentfully that even bondage

Was better than a life of wandering.

Think how long it must have been before

The death of bitter nostalgia, then of desire

For a promised land that none would ever see;

Longer still before they welcomed joy

To the temporary shelter of the way,

Stars shining through the scattered branches.

Catherine Tufariello <http://www.poems.com/featured.htm> <http://www.poems.com/featured.htm> Keeping My Name Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry Texas Tech University Press <http://www.ttup.ttu.edu>

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