Massachusetts 1, or Poem

Miraculous Things
Draft 2

A tiny duck is flying higher than his feathers should let him,
swooping down to swim faster than his tiny duck feet
should carry him in a perfectly
straight line across a river that is moving
so fast there should be no way he can fight it.
And his mother sits on the other side, without
so much as a ruffled feather to show any kind of fear
for her week-old baby duck.

But here I am, on a cliff that should leave me too high
for my 20/60 bare-eyed vision to perceive this tiny
duck’s head zooming across the whitecaps, with too little
sun protection to keep my super-white-girl knees from
frying into blistery crisps, and too little invested
in the commercialism of faith to admit that I think
I’m seeing a miracle.

And I imagine that you think my cynicism keeps me from
finding the courage to have faith in a powerful G-d, but
I don’t see miracles as magical. They
don’t come down straight from the hand your G-d’s magic wand,
and they’re hardly ever so pretty or convenient.

Miracles are acts of desperation
turned beautiful, like the star that shoots through the cloud cover
for its one last chance at glory before it dies, like
Merganser ducklings learning how to swim in the middle of a rapid,
like the sun wrestling through the morning fog to warm the ocean.

Miracles are accidents that allow
us to survive, like the hand that should’ve slipped
from my life jacket
before it hauled me safely into the boat but didn’t, like
the bullet that hits a soldier bad enough
to send him home alive, and

today I know that one man’s miracle
is another man’s tragedy,
that one mother Merganser can teach me
more about faith than any house of prayer
and here I sit with my near-blind eyes
and understand that this kind of miracle
is safe because
these miracles will never sell you on a god.
They’ll just give you faith.