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POETRY

Miracle

Show us a miracle,
we demand:

split a new sea,
soar above the clouds,
turn water into wine,
appear in a vision —

and I’ll believe in God.

But what’s more miraculous,
a sea split in two, or
a zygote parting across the middle,
its sticky cell walls standing tall and proud of its progeny?

What stimulates more wonder,
a man flying through the air, or
that our plants and pets, oceans and skyscrapers,
and candles and children stay firmly
planted to the ground?

We want to see water turned into wine,
without considering this could have been a two-state world
of solids and gases only,
or better yet, a two-dimensional universe,
we flat characters in pixelated forms,
capable of walking off the edge of the flat earth.

We’ll believe in God, we say,
if He appears in the form of a dream,
but what if He appeared in the form of a man
on our dusty earth, dressed in leathery sandals and
a carpenter’s calloused hands,
hands that probably recognized the quality and cut of wood
and the weight and type of nail he grew intimate with at Cavalry,

hands that twirled the lilies of the field,
and waved at the sparrows,
with the delight of a craftsman who loves his handiwork.

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Daniel Aum writes from Atlanta, GA. His work has been published in The Agape Review, North Avenue Review, Erato, and elsewhere.

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Image: A colony of embryonic stem cells, from the H9 cell line, Ryddragyn at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by Veronica McDonald.