My mother loved the Old Testament best,
stories that invited Charlton Heston
to bare his broad, oiled chest, his pronouncements
delivered with otherworldly cadence.
He looked something like my father, light hair
and good bones, tall and wide in the shoulders.
She’d seen The Ten Commandments a dozen
times as a child in Korea, the cool
dark theater, the screen a miracle
of movement and sound—a haven from a
world that never promised peace. When she
first saw my smiling father, she doubtless
found him familiar: his broad brow and white
teeth a comfort in the days that follow
war. She’d hold my hand each time the Red Sea
parted, Israelites pushing through, pharaoh’s
soldiers at their heels. I never saw her
in the Moses role, imagined, instead,
her following that flowing hair and raised
staff. But in the end she went first, the sea
and all its creatures crashing down around
us, our chariots flung into the whorl.
I reach for my father’s hand, my brother’s,
but they are not reaching for mine. They are
looking eastward, just spotting a head of
still black hair, a small hand waving goodbye.
