Egypt
by Meredith Johnson
The Nile, mid-afternoon: a thin brown boy
drops like a nail into the river below.
He splashes, little crocodile, in water too toxic
for even my feet. Above us, the sky billows down
with the weight of its owners-
a hundred brown deities all clustered on clouds.
I'm told that the pharoahs believed the sky
was an ocean through which they could row
toward heaven and into the skin of Osiris.
It must have been a glorious journey then,
launching into the air like balloons,
their bodies preserved in linen and gold.
I look at this boy and think: someday,
he will die. When he does,
he'll have swallowed enough river water
to float for a long time. Who knows
what else he will have done-driven a taxi
or built a bridge or raked sand from the desert.
Whatever it is, he will likely be tired.
So I hope he can float for a long time
on the buoyancy of his bones. And then
one day he will arrive like a raft
into the home of whatever god he loves,
brazen and naked, and tap that god's shoulder
to say, "Wait! Don't sit down yet!
There are more of us still to come."
