Everything will be fine, to paraphrase the anchoress, and everything
will be golden, like a crock
of manuka honey or hand-picked Bartlett pear, or like the calf
Aaron made out of earrings for the Israelites
who wanted a little something to sink their worship into, having
already waited long enough already
for Moses to return from the top of Mount Sinai. There he carried on
with the godhead in the form of a nonstop
burning bush Rastafarians equate with cannabis, which probably
would have come in handy as the Lord’s
nerves frayed overhead like gray cotton candy, having freed His people
from bondage only to watch as they broke at least one
if not three of His commandments—which, to be fair, hadn’t yet been
presented to them as such, so
there’s that…. Regardless, Moses had to scramble to talk
Yahweh down from wanting to slaughter each and every calf-
lover among them and just start over, saying what would posterity
think of Him to hear
He had delivered the chosen out of Egypt only to kill them in the desert
over a little craft project, although with no one left standing
to speak of, God’s motives would likely go unknown. Knowability
is felt by many to lie
at the heart of the imbroglio, as humans like to worship
mostly what they can know, or at least feast eyes on, and without
Moses, the Israelites lost focus, or lacked insight, or else just got
swept up. In the end, He Who Is
recalculated, deciding he could make his point with a sacrifice
of a mere 3,000, or the year-round population of Wellfleet, Mass.,
birthplace of America’s transatlantic wireless, and off whose banky shore
Capt. Sam Bellamy, pirate, went down with
the Whydah, a slave ship until he captured it in 1717, its hold
said to be carrying five tons of indigo, silver, gold dust, and gold.
This poem is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
