By a tree near the house of Amram. Miriam spoke,
Moses listened, things coming clear, though in pain.
‘You believe?’ she asked. ‘Believe?’ He said: ‘I was told
Of a taking from the water. My mother. As I
Called her. Hid nothing. Save for names. And names
She did not know. Perhaps not. Wishing to know.
Said that I was nourished. On Israelite milk. That a
Girl of the Israelites. Found me my nurse.’ And Miriam:
‘I know the palace, can describe the chamber,
The gardens. There was an inscription said,
Or they said it said, he was to be born in the
House of a king, but a lady said that every
House in Egypt was a house of the king.’ Moses: ‘Who?
Who?’ She said: ‘He who was to come, the child of the
Sun they called him. But to me he was to be
More than the child of the sun. Will you come home?’
‘You mean,’ he said, ‘I am to. Find a mother?’
Miriam said: ‘You are to find a family.’
Torches, horsemen, heralds positioning themselves
Among public effigies, effigies, the political men at work,
The trumpet and then the proclamation:
‘Be it known that Moses the Israelite,
Once falsely known as the Lord Moses,
Stands accused of the murder of a
Servant of the king, a free man, an Egyptian.
Let him be rendered up to authority.
Any who hide him or otherwise grant comfort
Render themselves liable to the exaction of the
Capital penalty. So written, so uttered.’
So the time for shy discovery in the house of Amram,
For the turning of an Israelite into an Israelite,
Was not long. The fine Egyptian silks
Were stuffed in a hollow in the wall, lidded with a stone,
And the Lord Moses was turned into an Israelite,
In a worn grey cloak, with the wanderer’s staff
In hands that were not yet hands of an Israelite.
He smiled. ‘I will learn to be an Israelite.
But not in. Slavery. In exile rather. Not a
Slave. Merely a. Fugitive.’ They wept. Miriam said:
‘We shall be together in the time of the setting free.’
But Aaron, bitterly: ‘If ever such a time should come.’
But Moses, not yet understanding: ‘In the time of the.’
The time that stretched now was the time of understanding,
Trying to learn to understand. With the sun setting,
He set his face to the desert. Be it known that
Moses the Israelite. Set his face to the desert.
3
THE BURNING BUSH
IT was not, he thought, if it could be called thought,
This shuffling or churning in his skull,
That the desert was empty. The desert was not empty,
Far far from empty: it was a most intricate poem
On the theme of thirst and hunger, it was a
Crammed gallery of images of himself, suffering,
And it rang with songs that never got beyond
The opening phrase, like: Went to find an Israelite
And found himself athirst or I am baked meat
I cannot eat. Once in joy he contended with
The collective appetite of a million flies
Over a migratory quail, almost fleshless, fallen in flight.
Twice he found porous rock that, struck with his staff
Though feebly, disgorged a fresh trickle. He lapped, blessing,
Thought what to bless? There was once stone
That he wished to take for some effigy but a
Thought of last night’s stars made him ashamed.
The way of Egypt with the stars was to make them
Bow down to the muddy god of the Nile, but here
They were, in a manner, unmolested. Nor, so it seemed to him,
Was it all straight lines up there, joining star to star,
No Egyptian geometry. Curves rather. Seeing that
Egypt was all measuring-rods, squares, cubes, pyramids,
But Unegypt, which could be, might as well be,
Israel, was curves – fruit and the leaping of lambs
And the roundness of the body gloried in not constrained
In geometry. Was he delirious, hearing himself say
God is round? The term meant nothing except that the
Sun and the moon possessed this perfect roundness,
But one day he saw sun and moon in the morning together
Not one not the other but the light that is given to both.
Given, that was it, but by what given? What or whom?
The god of the, the gods of the. Miriam had talked
Of the God of the Israelites, the God of Jacob.
Again the god of the. And you tamed the stars then
And set them to prophesying mud. God. The stars were back
In their firmament, aloof. Words mean what exists.
God not a word then. A cantrip. A device for
Keeping the stars free. At some uncounted dawn
On whatever day it was he saw ahead a mountain,
Must be a mountain, no mirage, with a nap of green,
But that could be mirage, as could as must be that,
Tree in the distance, solitary palm, fronds soon able to be
Counted. Counting, though, was Egyptian arithmetic,
Not apt for the desert. Reality was too royal,
Must be accorded the courtesy of averted eyes,
Not too boldly approached. Tried the cantrip God
To hold the tree there, and it held. Too weak to hurry, though.
The song of the daughters he could not yet hear,
Was a real song, royal, more than a first line:
What will love bring
When he comes?
A silver ring.
Earth will ring
With his tread
When he comes.
On his head
Kingly crown
When he comes down
From the hill.
What will he bring?
A silver ring
When he comes…
The mountain had a name: Horeb. This was a tree-grown pasture
In a valley, and from the well at dawn,
Jethro’s daughters drew, singing. But the song stopped
When the leering shepherds arrived, pushing in their buckets,
With Away there, bitches, find another well,
Scratch, would you, if you want to scratch
Scratch this itch. Then he came down from the hill,
Wearing dust not silver, crowned with his second anger,
His staff held high, then he smote like a king,
But after fell for faintness, seeing them run
And calling Mad, mad, he is mad, leaving blood in the dust.
Surrounded by round-armed girls, he smiled then
Turned up his eyes, seeing round flesh and green
And after nothing but ringing indistinguishable
Suns and moons. But he awoke in a tent smelling
Sheep’s cheese, sheep’s milk, new bread, an old shepherd
Smiling over him, a girl named Zipporah
Solicitous with a bowl, bread torn into warm milk.
He ate and gave his name, a man cast out of Egypt,
Seeking a new life. Jethro, set around with girls,
Was all to ready to talk to a man, talking at length:
‘I was once a priest of the town of Midian.
But I grew sick of stone idols, grew to believe
That faith was concerned with – well, not with,
If you know the word, multiplicity. A man
M
ust worship something great and simple. In the desert
Sometimes one sees an image of this. On Mount Horeb there
A man, I sometimes think, might see an even greater
Image of the truth. Out of meditation.
I have seen no visions. Perhaps I am too old.
I am certainly too old to climb it.’ Zipporah,
Gently: ‘Come to our story, father.’ Jethro smiled,
Saying: ‘Yes yes, I wander. It is easily told.
I turned against these idols, the people against me.
We are cut off. My daughters must draw water
Before the Midian shepherds leave their beds,
Otherwise they may draw no water. But they come
Earlier and earlier. Depriving us of water
Has become a cruel sport. I am grateful for what you did.’
Moses: ‘You have said that. Many times. Already.’
But Zipporah: ‘Gratitude is not a word.
It is the desire to keep on saying the word.’
‘My daughters,’ Jethro said, ‘are forward in their speech,
If not in their deeds. How can one man prevail
Against so many women’? Then, after a pause:
‘You are travelling further? Perhaps to the town itself?’
Moses said: ‘For the moment. My own story.
Ends here. My journey has been. Into exile.
For exile is everywhere. For the exile.’
Jethro asked: ‘Can you do shepherd’s work?’
Moses said: ‘I had always been taught. That work.
Was for slaves. Egypt taught me. Many false things.’
Jethro, urgently: ‘Put off that word exile.
It is your people who know exile, not you.’ And Moses, softly:
‘Yes. I must learn. To think of them. As my people.’
My people, lashed to labour under the disdainful eyes
Of a growing prince, and Moses already growing
Into a myth. The time would soon come in Pithom
For a story told by the old to the young: ‘Moses.
That was his name. He was brought up a royal prince
But one day he turned against the Egyptians. He
Killed some of them. Oh, I do not know how many,
But there were certainly many. He was strong, you see,
Like a bull or a lion. Yes yes, or a crocodile.
And then he escaped out of Egypt for they wished to kill him.
Some say he will come back. But I believe he is
Dead in the desert, eaten by vultures or something,
Just very white bones now, picked clean.
No no, not eaten by crocodiles, where is your sense?
There are no crocodiles in the desert. It is in the
Water you get crocodiles. They are full of water.
Their eyes are full of water. They cry when they eat you.’
Then the old king died and the prince Mernefta
Rules in his turn, the new Pharaoh, remembering Moses,
But not yet as a myth. ‘His accusers,’ he said one day.
‘Are any of these still living?’ And a minister:
‘Majesty, the accusation was naturally
Brought by the Crown. The Crown is still living.’
But Pharaoh said: ‘The Crown is he who wears it.
I hardly need my father’s dusty archives
As part of my inheritance. Is there a
Living accuser who does not wear a crown?’
‘Some Israelites,’ was the answer, ‘who swore that the
Accused was himself an Israelite.’ Pharaoh rose
And walked his council chamber among effigies, effigies,
Slaves following with fans. ‘I knew him. Moses. I
Remember him with some tenderness – an elder cousin
Who was always promising to take me hunting.
He would listen to bats and the cries of fieldmice.
No one else would hear them – only he. I cannot
Easily see him as a great vengeful lion, striking
Men dead with a rod.’ A minister said: ‘There
Was a death, majesty. An Egyptian corpse. Very bloody.’
‘Men,’ said Pharaoh, ‘are not, I think, beaten to death.
The beater must die of exhaustion first. So. It was
Officially I who sent him to Pithom and to this
Old accusation. Did I also send him
To death in the desert’? Another minister said:
‘There is no certainty of his death. At least
Two caravans have brought back news. News of a sort.
Of, for instance, a hero who came out of Egypt
And into Midian, killed twenty men with a blow,
Married seven or eight sisters – the exact number is unclear.
The name we heard seemed to be some
Outlandish deformation of his true name.’ Pharaoh smiled.
‘I would prefer him to be back with us. It would be
Good to see him smiling at my triumphs.
His smile was like none else’s – no fanfare of teeth.
It always seemed to hold back, to hold something back.’
And the first minister said: ‘So, majesty,
The sentence is quashed? The accusation cancelled?’
Pharaoh said: ‘Let us have him in Egypt again.’
But not even a king of Egypt could put time back.
Moses, the shepherd, with his, or Jethro’s flocks,
Dreaming under Horeb, dreamed of no future other than
A shepherd’s future. A husband and a father,
His wife, as was to be foreseen, the eldest, Zipporah,
His son named Ghersom, a strange name, apter for himself:
Stranger in a strange land. And the future? Well –
There was the taking of Jethro’s place, when the time came,
And the time could not be long. Problem of girls
Without dowries, a whole family cut off
From the idolators of Midian. He turned now to wave
As Jethro watching him, Zipporah, Ghersom in her arms,
Up there by the tents and the palm, rain-clouds behind them,
This being a place of rare rain, but of rain.
Jethro was saying to Zipporah: ‘Now you see how
A good shepherd works. First he takes to pasture
The very young, so that they may eat of the
Tender grass, full of juice, and then the older ones
That they may eat what is fitting for them, and last
The full-grown sheep that can chew the tough grass. All this
I did not teach him: he seemed to know it already.’
The child Ghersom cried, and Zipporah rocked him,
Singing: ‘Ghersom – Ghersom – stranger in a
Strange land.’ Her father said: ‘A gloomy lullaby.
A gloomy name. It rings somehow of his father.
Settled and not settled. Never quite at rest.
But a good son-in-law. An only son-in-law.’
In sad affection he turned his eyes to the other girls,
Washing clothes and squabbling. A good son-in-law,
Carrying a lamb to the desert for sacrifice,
The knife raised, Jethro intoning: ‘Unknown of the desert,
Great one, faceless, voiceless, we offer thee this
Fruit of the fertile lands. Accept it of thy goodness,
Eternal unity, whatever, whoever thou art.’ But the name
Moses, Moisha, Musa was no unknown of the desert.
The Egyptian patrols heard it among nomads, searching,
As they had been bidden, but long in finding.
Until at dawn, walking to birdsong, smiling he suddenly
Started, and she said: ‘What do you hear? I hear nothing,
Nothing but birdsong.’ But grasped his robe, rising,
And left the tent to see horsemen on the hill crest,
Egyptians. The daughters of Jethro welcomed them,
With yesterday’s bread, pitchers of well-water,
And their leader spoke to Moses, saying: ‘You have proof
That this is your name?’ Moses smiled and replied:
‘A name is merely. What a man is called. I am
Called Moses. My wife is called Zipporah. My son is
Ghersom. And here is my. Wife’s father. Jethro.’ –
‘The documents I hold’, said the officer, taking bread
With a desert courtesy, ‘are signed by the royal hand.
They attest your right to return to Egypt freely,
To resume your former status, former office.’
‘My status. And office. You see. I am a shepherd.
I am an Israelite.’ But the leader swallowed and said:
‘You are the Lord Moses, cousin to the Pharaoh.
As such, your place and duty are self-evident.
If I may say so. With respect.’ But Moses said:
‘You are not then come. To force me. Back to Egypt?’ –
‘I have no such authority. I am but the bearer
Of a royal message.’ And Moses spoke his last words to them
(They were welcome to rest. Then let them return to Egypt):
‘My compliments. To the Pharaoh. Tell him that I
Too have my kingdom.’ He left them, broke bread alone,
Then led his lambs to pasture. But that day
Was to be no common day. Tending his flocks,
He heard a sound from Horeb, a sound as of the
Manifold cracking of twigs in the fire, and he turned
To see the mountain melting, shifting towards him,
Then setting in its old shape: an illusion
Of a more than Egyptian kind, occasioned no doubt
By today’s voices from Egypt. But, peering, he saw
What seemed no magic: there on the upper slope
A flame that burned steady. Who had made fire on Horeb?
He left his lambs and, staff in hand, incredulous,
Moved to the mountain. The flame burned steady.
Its reality was somehow fixed in his brain by the
Smell of wool-grease on the hand that he lifted to
Shade his eyes from the light, to see better the
Flame that burned steady on the upper slope. So, slowly,
Driven solely by desire for a strange thing to be
No longer strange, he began to climb, and the climb
Hid the flame from him until, sweating, panting,
No longer a young prince racing over the delta,
He faced at length a boulder on the upper slope
And rounded, panting, the boulder and there he saw a
Flame burning steady but the flame calm as a diamond