{"id":245,"date":"2024-06-30T16:10:29","date_gmt":"2024-06-30T16:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/?p=245"},"modified":"2025-06-13T20:11:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T20:11:00","slug":"moses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/moses\/","title":{"rendered":"Moses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Moses<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Give me your hand. We have to cross<br \/>\nthe river and my strength fails me.<br \/>\nHold me as if I were an abandoned package<br \/>\nin a wicker basket, a lump that moves<br \/>\nand cries in the twilight. Cross the river<br \/>\nwith me. Even if this time the waters<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t part before us. Even if this time God<br \/>\ndoesn&#8217;t come to our aid and a flurry of arrows<br \/>\nriddles our backs. Even if there is no river.<\/p>\n<p>Luis Alberto de Cuenca<\/p>\n<p><em>Translated from the Spanish by Gustavo P\u00e9rez Firmat<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>what it means<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There is an unnamed threat. Maybe a persecution, a war, but we are not safe here, and we need to escape. I ask you to help me make it to a new place and to come with me. Even if the story we are telling ourselves is not true in all its facts, it\u2019s emotionally true; we need to escape.<\/p>\n<p>We are as precious as Moses. We might not be named by God as important, but we are important.<\/p>\n<p><strong>why I like the poem <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I feel so much love in this poem. That first line \u201cgive me your hand\u201d is a command, but a command to be together. Same with \u201chold me.\u201d I also really like this way of using the Bible. The writer assumes we all know about Moses being left in a basket in the bullrushes. The poem builds off that background knowledge.<\/p>\n<p><strong>craft<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That last line blows my mind. You mean you are allowed to undercut the facts you just laid out? This is not the cop-out of \u201cit was all a dream.\u201d This is like the energy of being thrust off the earth into a new equally valid but much stranger space.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s also a lot of cool duplicating with variation in here. Like \u201cWe have to cross the river\u201d becomes \u201ccross the river with me\u201d and the three \u201ceven ifs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Moses Give me your hand. We have to cross the river and my strength fails me. Hold me as if I were an abandoned package in a wicker basket, a lump that moves and cries in the twilight. Cross the river with me. Even if this time the waters don&#8217;t part before us. Even if&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poem-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/debbiebacharach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}