The Ten Sayings

What is usually translated in English as the Ten Commandments, in the Torah text is Aseret ha-D'varim, the Ten Things, the Ten Statements, the Ten Declarations, the Ten Words, or the Ten Sayings.

As He created the world with only His voice,
so He tried to say us into goodness.
But we are not the waters, whose only duty
is to swarm, or the sparrow hawk
who flies across the dome of heaven, G-d's thought
incorporated. And if the raptor swoops,
snatching a finch in its talons, tearing the flesh
until the bones and wings, plucked clean, fall
to the ground below, no one calls it murder.
We, alone, lie and steal because the terms
create a failing from the standard stuff
of camouflage and plunder. Our G-d calls us
not to survive like those spiderlings,
feeding of the bodies of their mothers,
not, like the jackal, to eye the cheetah's kill,
but to be human, obedient or sinning,
the only creatures who believe in Him.