David W. Landrum

Reverse Moses

I would wish a Moses in reverse —
Moses retrograde, Moses bizzaro —
Moses who would lug the heavy stone plates
Rembrandt drew so well,
covered with Hebrew script,
back up Mount Sinai
and hand them to God.
“People don’t like these rules,”
he would say. “Can’t we come up
with something else?”
He would turn snakes to staffs
so children would not be bitten
when they played by the Red Sea;
and he would tell Pharaoh to let his people go.
“You’re not a god,” he’d say, “and they know that.
Your people are the ones who need freeing.”
He would hold up his magical walking stick
and locusts would evacuate the land,
lice die, frogs hop away, hail, murrain
disappear. The Nile would become
unbloody — clear so you would see
the hippopotami and crocodiles
down in its depths.

As far as the death of the first-born sons —
“Get real,” he would say. “Let’s leave
the kids alone. This is between adults.”
Lots more: out in the wilderness
he would arrange for some variety in food.
He would not strike the rock
and not forfeit his chance to see the Promised Land.
Settling Canaan he would be equitable —
would not massacre the Ammonites
and the Amalekites. And when he died
the place of his burial would be known
so all could come and venerate his life.

Bayern-Sud

The Monastery of the Hawks, where monks
who looked like tankards brewed their fine black beer,
set on a mountainside to keep away
invaders, women, and the motley crew
of non-religious, lingers in my mind
not for the ages-old stone walls built up
to shield the cenobites, nor the baroque
chapel, not the shrines and not even
the Doppelbock that helped them fast away
long holy days, dark as the light down in
the cellars where they stored it in huge casks
six-hundred years in use, soaked with the dross
of brewings kept two-hundred-thousand days —
rather, the patchwork I could see from there:
the squares of ripened barley, tawny; fields
of purple bean-leaf, green rapunzel-plant;
a quilt of autumnal variety,
that rolled out to the distant Alps. One road
stretched through it all, past farms with gardens where
old kerchiefed women spread manure and where
wood crucifixes (Jesus, white as snow,
his head bowed sadly down) dotted the roads,
commemorating accidents, sad spots
where people died amid the silent pines.