Exodus

Festive windows spill white light,

The streets thrill with frost,

But in the house, the air is sweet

With candle scent, with carols

Piping pure and bright, round

Children bundled snug in arms,

Daydreaming of feasting, gifts,

Our reassuring liturgies.

It was not white and peaceful when

Across proud Egypt’s slums, the

Plagues’ crescendo swelled with dread

As exiles gathered, stern and stunned,

With sandals tied,

With cloaks tucked in,

Squatting down on unswept floors

To eat in haggard haste.

Bitter herbs of promise stung each tongue

As in their bated midst there lay

The remnants of a spotless lamb,

Ribcage jutting up amid

The offal and the twisted limbs,

Perfect once, not perfect any more,

Crimson clotting cold upon the door.

The doors were bolted shut,

The burnished sun fell red upon the Nile,

Echoed anguish piercing deathly calm,

As out among the darkening streets

Darkness fell upon each firstborn bed,

And exiles kept in reverence and dread

A holy vigil.

They huddled in the great storm’s eye

Outcasts casting hope upon a sign.

On the eve of Exodus, they knew

Contentment is no cheap and easy thing,

No bauble, fat and glittering

No easy song, no comfortable bed,

That on the steep and narrow path

We pilgrims are

The stones of hard Jerusalem,

Lazarus, laid silent in the tomb,

The gnarled roots in the garden’s gloom;

Wept over and bloodied,

With holy tears,

With sacred blood.

On the eve of Exodus, they knew

That comfort often comes in robes of red,

Hiding for a time

Beneath a darkened glass

The bliss to come,

Not wiping every tear,

As yet,

But weeping with

Beside the weeping bed,

Not healing every wound,

As yet,

But giving us Himself:

Our peace,

Our refuge,

And our daily bread.

The featured image titled “Oxford City Street View at Night” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and used with her permission for Cultivating. 

Sam Keyes

Sam is a poet, essayist, photographer, and songwriter, who explores the interspace between imagination and reason, faith and doubt, the physical and the transcendent. He’s inspired by the examples of G.K. Chesterton, Wendell Berry, and George Steiner: rare thinkers who chose to dwell in the painful yet fruitful tensions of these ‘in-between’ spaces.

Sam lives with his wife Colette and their two young daughters in the cathedral city of Winchester, UK. A recovering academic in the natural sciences, Sam now mixes science and semantics as a Patent Attorney; but by night, he returns to his first love of crafting sentences, stanzas and songs.

In addition to his column, poetry, and photography for Cultivating, Sam’s work has been published by The Gospel Coalition, Ekstasis, and in the poetry collection Cultivating the Sacred Ordinary (ed. Leslie Bustard & Amy Malskeit).