Passover

They thought they were safe
that spring night when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert
without a home without a bed
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the night sky.


-- Lynn Unger