Were we slaves in Egypt?  Did the Exodus happen?

We were certainly second-class citizens, non-citizens, with no rights, barred and confined, exiled and deported.

Imagine sand instead of black earth.  Put down pyramids and the cities of Ramses and Pithom.  Let the Nile run past Warsaw.  It’s almost the time of the annual inundation.  A boy with reddish payos is feeding the storks.

There was a Moses, Mordechai Anielewicz, and a Pharoah, Heinrich Himmler.  A rebellion and attempted breakout.

But this time fire and typhus and starvation, soldiers and police, were unleashed in stages against the Jews.  And Exodus led to the camps.

Now let alligators glide in the Hudson, and cats dressed in jewels hunt in Morningside Park. 

Huddled in dorms, the Jewish students dip the parsley in salt water, consider the shankbone. 

The mezuzah on the doorpost.  To take it in or leave it out proudly?  

Many of the students eat matzah before packing for home.

This is what it’s like when the crowd wants blood.  When they can’t distinguish between a few Jews-only politicians and settlers on the other side of the world, and the chemistry major with tzitzit, his head full of formulas.

When they pound the windows of the hummus restaurant, and make gestures of throat-slitting.

When they protest genocide, but would commit it.

It makes you want to leave for Tel Aviv or Tzfat, to be ingathered and protected by some kind of strong hand and outstretched arm. 

(Though even there the land runs with our blood, and the enemy is all around.)

We are heading…somewhere.  Hopefully the terrorists will drown.  But the protesters will have to cross with us.  And we will have to cross with the families of dead Gazans.

Purists may object:  this is not the woods, there are people everywhere.  Let them come here in spring, walk a mile in my shoes.

You’ve breathed tulip and iris breath into my convalescence, modeled growth for the bone cells of my hip, slowly fusing with titanium, native and man-made. 

A thousand little trails–trees that way, or trees that way.  The roll of the land is slightly different…

The little trail that runs 50 feet, to get us close to old-growth.  Just the generosity of that.

Water through the trees.  Shining in the distance.  People on rock slopes on the shore, like turtles, with turtles.

People arrive from all parts of the city, through all the entrances.  Our internal Ellis Island.

Tourists.  Deep New Yorkers.  The man in a windbreaker standing in a rocky grotto doing the crossword.  You, sir, are a New Yorker! And the ambiance enters through the top of his head.

Birders–the obsession, the gentleness, clustered around the feeders.  Loners scanning the branches together, in a dense hush, or whispering shop.

Impossibly long lane of peak cherry blossoms, thick with tourists and New Yorkers.  Clogged by girls having prom portraits done, women taking selfies for Match or Hinge.  Good choice—goddesses, incarnations of the spring!

Central Park–collective centuries-long labor of love!  The workers in four-wheelers, giving directions, laughing at my confusion.

Need to take a break.  On a commemorated bench, with epitaphs.  A couple sat here for decades, this was their spot.  A hint of the whole story.  A beloved grandmother, seeking this view, entering at West 81^st St, first striding then walking slower and slower.

You mark the year, connect with earth’s orbit, rotation, angle, with the sun and all the planets.

You’ve been a gift to my eyes, worked me out with emotions.

Sunny, cloudy, hot, cold, rainy, misty—didn’t matter.  Different realities to witness and walk through.

Intellect in the air!  On the path ahead.  And the birds, really, bless you. 

I have pictures to take away, tree porn to gloat over.  Hundreds of candidates for Miss April, all of them speaking of peace.

Trees and flowers beamed their life in all directions.  I tried to draw close.  Send out…something–my face, my skin, a vessel or mental octopus arms, toward life.

And all the trails not taken, the undiscovered country–streams, individual squirrels, micro-climates…

I walk through my own smiles from yesterday.  Yes, for me the park, this last time, has a whiff of my previous smiles.

All the different subcultures and opinions made a crude body politic. The parts did not quite reject each other; the livid stitches had healed over into just skin.  We could lurch around, drink water from the stream, appreciate the flowers, grunting and cooing at them.

We had lactating breasts for the growing population, and the genitals of both sexes; we used birth control and we didn’t.

And we watched the news.

Then suddenly a man appeared at my bedside in the dark.  Restrained me in iron cuffs.  And all night, he ran his fingers over me, searching out the lines between parties, between races.

I had always been hesitant, of course, but I could function.  I heard voices, but they were whispers; the overriding voice was me.  And I could control my limbs, my movements, with decent precision, passing laws intended to help.

But his fingers—it was uncanny the way he knew where to press.  As if I had scurvy, my old scars opened… 

The cognitive dissonance I’d always lived with began to shriek.  Two voices shrieking incessantly, clawing at each other.  Right there on the bed, I started to hemorrhage.  And separate.  There is my hand, bleeding from the wrist into the blanket.  To move it now would take telekinesis.

I can’t unite the voices anymore.  The man is kneeling at my bed again, his fingertips searching.  Mercifully I’m going away.  I hate him, my enemy, my destroyer.  With my last bit of consciousness, last bit of will, I vote for him.