That forty-first year we too became strangers:
Shook off our stone homes, tattered our robes,
Shucked the crumbling bread from molded cupboards.
Mere miles out we met, shared tangled stares.
Our skin had never known the Nile.
Our sweat had never darkened Jordan’s bed.
And in their wake we washed up on the ruins,
Gazed in their eyes on perfect excavations
Spared the ban on sworn deceit.
The pails have worn their paths astride my thigh.
The quail dogs prime their muzzles in my skirt
As I pass uphill beneath the yoke of noon,
Uncertain of this second birth.
