Pondering Exile in the Temple of Dendur

The bulrushes do not breathe:
they are mirrored in Central Park trees,
who shiver outside of the glass.

The bullrushes frame my faces's reflection
in the rippling pond. Once Moses was framed
in their green, along the Nile, cradled in a brown ark.

Tar mingled with the drops of breast-milk
that fell from Yocheved's teat, as she bent over
the sleeping child to kiss his cheek.

Batya was bathing by the bullrushes
when she encased the baby in her alabaster body.
At night, her body was a stone shrouded in white sheets.

Her breasts were drier than desert winds,
so Yocheved nursed the baby, with the milk of her bones
and the mud of her skin. And he carried her uncle's bones

through split seas and desert winds. At night, he dreamt
of the bullrushes' breath. During the day, he heard the voice of God
in the burning flames and desert winds. God heard the voice of the Israelites

in mounds of mortar. I hear only the sounds of my breath,
mingling with the stillness of the bullrushes, like me, exiled
to foreign waters that do not split like the alabaster bowls of time.