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At Rest Before A Statue In The Desert
Two adolescent Hebrews with their child
pause for a brief rest in the shade cast by
your massive statue (although half concealed
yet in the sand). Its peaceful, granite face
looks calmly from the desert toward the land
where lust for idled idols and the power
their priesthoods wielded cast you out, then down
to death. That common upstart Ramases
(the second of that name) thought he had built
the most colossal images, but he
did not know of this one. And those who carved
your name off all the monuments---therefore
from Egypt's history and afterlife;
or so they thought, as so thought Horemheb
(that peasants' son who you had once called friend)
who marked his reign as Pharaoh from the night
your father died. But this memorial
(out of the reach of all who had betrayed
you and your vision) stands alone out here,
a gift from Ankhesenpaaten in the days
before she fled with Tutankhaten (her
beloved for all time) from seethng Thebes
(his double's death, unfortunately, gave
them opportunity to save their lives).
And now these adolescent Hebrews sit
in your cool shadow, with their child; barefoot,
the three of them and weary. As you seem
to look upon them, they cannot have known
that you had been a prophet of the same
God Whom their prophets spoke of in that land
(called Israel, once, and Judea now;
but know to you as Canaan). In the sun's
light, you perceived His presence and to show
it as an image, you had added to
the solar disc rays terminating in
hands that held out the cross of life to all.
He---the source of all life and the point
to which all destinies proceed; Whose light
creates, restores, refreshes and revives
all that has dwelling on His fecund earth;
Who placed the fixed stars and the moving stars
upon flawless canopy of sky---
bid you declare him to the world of flesh
and blood, and with a holy zeal desert
the darkened temples of the old, false gods
to worship, with simplicity and truth,
in new pavilions, sunlit, filled with flowers,
and open to the sky from which, above
it and all things, He looks down with a glow,
and beam, and smile of love and loving care
upon the living and all He has made.
And, for His glory, you abandoned Thebes,
and built a new and splendid city in
a place where none had ever dwelt before;
the city that, too soon, wroth Horemheb
had broken and dismantled, stone by stone.
But Ankhesenpaaten, who had been a scamp,
the boldest of your daughters but, as well,
the humblest, always barefoot (she despised
shoes, hypocrites, and stifling protocols)
commission this last tribute---thus designed
and carved in utmost secrecy and placed
where Horemheb and those who followed him
should be too proud, or else too stupidly
clueless, to look where she, a shoeless girl---
a clever minx whose unshod footsteps' tease
brought Tutankhaten peaks of fierce desire,
and peeks and glimpses of her beauty traced
beneath sheer, gauze-like gowns---had set the site.
And now, long centuries and more since then,
this barefoot Hebrew girl lifts up her son
(who is a little more than two years old)
to look once more on your stone face. Then with
her husband (oh, the joys of teenaged love),
she and her son will travel on a while
to Alexandria, and there, among
the Jewish quarter, find a place to live,
a shelter from the fierce wrath that had sought,
lately, to slay the child. Three special gifts---
gold, frankincense, and myrrh---will help provide
for their domestic needs through their stay
in that fair seaport city at the Nile's
mouth, safely sheltered there until the God,
whom you believed embodied in the sun
shall send for them again as God had once
and long ago foretold, set forth in these
words: "'Out of Egypt have I called my Son'"---
the Day star now held in His mother's arms.
Starward
[jlc]
