What I Had Hoped

A second census in the book of Numbers, taken after yet another rebellion and its punitive aftermath, finds that there is not one person remaining from the original group who left Egypt. In theory, that might have meant that the people who crossed over into the promised land would not make the mistakes of their parents. But, of course, that’s not what happened.

for my son

If I could send you into the promised land,
as you were the instant you revealed
through some complex cascade of signaling
that you were ready to come into this world,
you might be free; you might encounter G-d
uninflected by the long whine
of adult disappointment. But once you started
down the birth canal, the limits of me
began to mold you. Your head, misshapen for days
after that journey, filled with the lullabies
I remember my own mother sang on the banks
of the Nile; you ate what my body could concoct
from manna and briny water. I did what I knew;
it was not enough to enter Canaan.
My love for you is boundless as the sea,
but I am human, standing on the shore;
to G-d, the sea is water in a tub,
and upbringing, a stain spreading through it.