Parting Seas with Jochebed

In Exodus 2, when the mother of Moses has to defy the orders of the king to hide her son, and then send him down the river, she has no idea how the rest of the story goes. She doesn’t know she might get him back momentarily, or that he’ll end up changing the world, or that the seas will someday obey him. She just lets him go down the river.

According to the math of the king,
the world had enough of one kind of person.
Enough to say,
“If you were born with this kind of blood
running through this kind of skin,
the eyes of this kind of mother,
the smile of this kind of father,
if you were born on that side of the river,
Your parents should just throw you in.”

But when she made that kind of a person,
cradled that kind of a person,
nursed that kind of a person,
called “Good” that kind of a person,
she knew she had to hide that kind of a person.

If she could love him for enough days,
whisper enough words
to bury the truth
under his skin,
to set his heart
to the beat of hers,
Maybe the river would not sink him,
but carry him.

She cannot yet see — 
the angels will rise from the fire,
the serpent will strike from the staff,
the plagues will fall from the sky,
salvation will pass by her kind.

She does not yet know
how a king
can fall from a throne
or how a sea can rise
to become a road
for weary and battered feet.

All she knows is the wrenching,
the feel of the water, like poison,
she hopes can make him free,
even while her own life
is shackled
to the mother she imagined she would be.