Ask the old ones.
Not for stories—
for dates, distances,
what came first and what followed.
Has anything like this happened before?
A people hearing a voice
from the middle of fire
and continuing to breathe
after the sentence ended.
Fire does one thing well.
It finishes what it starts.
Yet there they stood,
faces lit from below,
listening to licks and flares
carry meaning
without turning kindling to ash.
Or this—
a nation taken out of another nation,
not quietly,
but with signs that carved faces
and covered the sun,
by a hand that did not hide itself,
with a kind of persistence
that left artifacts in places
and on the skeletons that witnessed it.
Ask Egypt,
if ruins could answer.
Ask the sea,
which briefly agreed
to try on the accoutrements of land
and then returned
to its original fashion.
They were shown these things
so they would know—
this is how the account records it.
Not suspect.
Not wonder.
Know
that the voice was not one among many,
not a possibility,
a debate
between equally convincing objections.
Above, below—
no second version waits
to be discovered later.
This is the claim
as it has been carried forward.
So they are told to keep it.
Not out of fear,
though fear was present.
Not out of habit,
though habit will come.
Keep it
so that when their children ask
what happened in those days,
they will not offer
a softened account.
Tell them
they heard something
that should have undone them
and did not.
Tell them
they walked through what closed behind them.
Tell them
there was no comparison
then,
and there isn’t one now.
—Iris Lennox
Based on Deuteronomy 4:32-40
Iris Lennox 