Moses The end is satisfactory, that he believed but did not see the Promised Land created out of wilderness by hands that built the Pyramids: What quiet vineyards, shade of olive groves - abundance - there would be...
Up on the mountain in his ivory tower, alone with dreams that seemed to come from heaven, he fancied how wrongs could be righted, given simple laws: a perfect order, perfect in form. It takes seconds to conceive, but hours and weeks and months before a birth, and all that time, unseen, the embryo inside, the ego in the egg he fertilised, transcends from one-celled creature to a fish caught in a swirl of fate; becomes a whole small law unto itself, an individual whose hungry mouth and hands reach out beyond fragility, find worlds to orbit round its tears, protect its innocence, its infant pride. The dreamer’s spared those growth scenarios by dying on the mountainside, his tenline poem smashed, though memorised (thou shalt and thou shalt not); spared knowing his assault on stone metastasised to such malignant idols. The best was on the mountain, in the end.
'Moses' previously appeared in Acumen.