————-—When the Torah was revealed, it was written in black fire on white fire.
————————————————————-— —Zohar
Say you could only count to six.
Say seven didn’t exist—no Sabbath, no holy
rest, no end to week. Say you could
not read beyond vav ( ו )—the sixth letter
of the alef-beis & the third letter—an empty
consonant—of God’s name. Vav before a word
becomes a conjunction like &.
Vav is what they call, in Latin, mater lectionis.
She is a mother prone to weeping
to any vendor in the shuk who’d lend an ear.
Say the only letter in God’s name
other than vav were hay ( ה )
Hay comes fifth in the alef-beis.
Hay would be as far as you could progress
in the Fibonacci sequence. Yod ( י )
the tenth letter does not exist & as yod is
the first letter in God’s name,
God’s name does not exist
apart from hay, a sometimes silent letter,
& vav, a mother layered in ink as if to mourn
not the loss of God but the erasure
of her children from the pages of days.
Say the world were stuck on day six,
that as day seven neared, God’s last “Let there ____”
became gasps for oxygen from a child’s incinerated airways.
Say the letters of the alef-beis were conspiring to cloud
Moses’s eyes at Sinai, as they were loath not to have
God’s face all to themselves.
Say when Moses refuses to stand down that the letters were left no choice
but to deploy white phosphorus.
Chaim ben Avram is a poet whose work appears in Oxford Poetry, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, and Tin House. His debut novel, Spiral Jetty, is forthcoming from 7.13 Books.
Photo by Tanner Mardis on Unsplash
