Sinai The Next Day

The morning after 

I wonder

was I fully present

did I receive as the earth does,

in gullies and fields filling 

my empty thirsty places. 

Will anything wild or cultivated

survive the mowing

down that is inevitably

my returning to yet 

another ordinary day?

 

Even with the fire, smoke, lightning

I became distracted 

by the trance of my familiar self.

She slipped back in  

the one who walked

towards then back

for forty-nine days, forty years, 

for sixty-six in this lifetime.

 

Some moments I became

hefker, ownerless and everywhere,

wind, rock, cleft,

mountain and I lost

track of where my old

stories, my old pains

and habits were,

hidden under my seven veils.

Some moments, some centuries

I stopped counting,

or looking for maps

and it was as if

five thousand seven hundred eighty two years 

were a breathe and the

next one a fresh

beginning. 

 

I remember

my relief, my sorrow 

when Moshe told us

that only he would go

the rest of the way

up the mountain, 

not me, not this time -

was this exclusion, 

protection? I still look

towards the mountain 

trying to make sense 

of this life of distant

and imperfect love.

 

I awake

on this the next day

with complicity

with what still constricts

me, the skin and muscles 

of the old stories 

expanding and contracting

over a lifetime and so I

resume the practice

of re-opening the gates

with tenderness and

tenacity for the sake

of welcoming

what comes through

into the small house

of my body and mind,

I offer a cup of tea,

a nomadic sigh,

a few questions -

Can we be a people, today

tomorrow, who try to live 

in union with the sacred, with justice

and compassion: we are so

very lost, we who live so little

of what we receive, what

we know.  

 

Here I am the same me 

even after -  I forget or remember.

I see a fisher cat

running through the day lilies

past the forsythia into the woods

toward the mountain. I fear 

its teeth, it’s unpredictable hungers.

We are the same - 

seeking to ascend

towards some refuge, some way

to make a life on this earth

of diminishing wilderness.