AUTHOR'S NOTES: This is a poem about one of the most overlooked atrocities in the Bible. Many have spoken about injustice in the Bible, but I haven't found anyone else championing the firstborn children of Egypt even though they're some of the most innocent victims you could think of. So I guess I'll have to do it.

...and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.
-Exodus 12:30

A Great Cry In Egypt

I remember I couldn't sleep, though I knew
That I should.
I hoped that I would
Be able to go out to play, now that the darkness was gone.
All I thought of was how much fun it would be to go out and meet my friends to play
Now that everything
Had gone
More or less
Back to normal.
That was what I thought.

It happened so quick, I seemed to see everything very still and silent like Pharaoh's statues
Like a night with no wind.
It was like this for just a moment and then the wind came a thousandfold, and the wind had people in it.
They didn't look like
Regular people.
I thought maybe they were gods, but I knew of no god who had the wings of a bird on his back, and there were
So many of them
Too many for them all to be gods.

They went through me and then they took me with them and I wanted to
Say something
But it was all too fast
And as they carried me away I thought I could hear my mother and father and brother.
They were crying. They were crying
For me.
I, too, started to cry.
But the tears wouldn't come.

I saw others being carried away by this wind that was not a wind
Exactly.
I saw some of my friends, I wanted to cry out
To them, ask what was happening.
But I knew
They knew
As much as I did.

When the wind stopped there was a dark ring with fire around the edge and going out
Further than I could see. There was no gap
In between flames, no gap at all! There was only fire all around, no stop at all.
I was in this ring, and there were others
Sharing it with me.

For a moment we could only stare, but then we were shouting
The names of our friends, and I was united with some
But my best friend wasn't there.
There was Pharaoh's son, and there were so many babies I couldn't even begin
To count them all.

I didn't cry then.

I suppose we all knew we couldn't leave the ring because we didn't try to leave; instead
We spoke, and we discovered that not one of us
Had an older brother
Had an older sister.
We were all the oldest
Brothers and sisters.

Together we made a list of every firstborn we knew,
Every firstborn we had ever met,
Every firstborn we had ever heard of,
And every one of them was with us. Even the babies.

And Pharaoh's son's eyes went wide and he said, "It was them."
And he told us
What he had heard.
He told us of the threat against his life,
The one that his father hadn't listened to.
"Their god killed us," he said. "We are dead."

Then I cried.