Milk and Honey, by Laura Page

Moses Sees the Promised Land Before His Death, by Lesser Ury (b. Prussia), 1928.

Milk & Honey
       
Milk

The only milk I know is the flock’s ewes’ from long ago & that the desert was a factor affecting the clotting properties after the teat. But even the desert can’t permeate the lamb’s ear. My own lambs, swarthy, not Egyptian, their ear lobes were this velvet clotting.

Honey

Bites raw, like the igneous of this sojourn. Bites amber, like the coral I gaped at hiking the ocean they called red. All the live fishes suffocated of a sudden—already flushed. Who could have known their breathlessness would turn them rose.  And the sea monsters I would never have known existed—they are honey now, too, compared even to the conquered Philistines.

Milk

My children’s children have children. I watch them bleed green stalks of a white substance. They’ll bleed more green when they descend to home those stalks. My granddaughters are women with babies at their breast. Some of them think I was a pharaoh.

Honey

I’ve grow horns like the lizards. I think it’s so I can joust with God with more than just my ribs when I cross over. I wake. Were the horns a dream? An infant screams and I tell his mother to bring him to me. Smashed to the tender sole, a bee.  I lean far as I dare over this precipice to see the flower whence it came.

Laura Page

​​This poem was written as part of the 20 Poem Challenge.

Laura Page is a graduate of Southern Oregon University where she studied English and Sociology. Her work has appeared in many literary publications, including Red Paint Hill, The Minola Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Kindred. Her chapbook, "Children, Apostates" is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.