a famous poet warned. If you let it in, your poem is crammed
with two million Israelites clutching babies in arms, 
with satchels of clothes and unleavened bread, 
and you’ve invited in the enormous weight of a God 
who punishes evil by slaying slave owners’ children, 
so here come the Egyptians as God splits open 
that unmentionable sea just in time 
for the migrants to cross and closes it right up 
on the pursuers, and your poem is choking on all those
drowning men, flailing horses and wrecked chariots, 
and next thing you know you have races and nations and power 
and poverty all spilled in the red ink of misery 
and your poem is overwhelmed —
it’s baffled that He (because it’s always he) never sat them all down 
and explained this wasn’t what He had in mind 
those intense seven days he created a world so magnificent 
poets can’t stop trying to describe it, which is what happened 
to me when it snowed at the beach at high tide, not just a dusting 
but a full-on onslaught of snow we hadn’t seen in these parts in years, 
downing telephone wires and snapping tree branches and power out. 
When the snow finally stopped and the tide receded,
it left a wide strip of sand along the shore, snow mounds piled
like crystal dunes on one side and the ocean’s perpetual roar 
on the other, and in between the tiny miracle of a parting 
I passed through, kicking scattered seashells like nothing strange
and beautiful had happened, nothing that needs to mention the Red Sea.