It began with rumors of wonders
then the wonders themselves
made necessary by so much belief:

a two-headed calf, a deaf-mute  
chanting the mass, mid-summer snow,
a Virgin bleeding from limestone eyes.

All were signs, though of what
the wise and witless alike disagreed.
So they gathered up their lives

and swarmed south, churning fields
and fouling streams with their passion,
cutting peat to roast the rabbits

snared on demesnes abandoned
by shabby barons and silken earls
fearful of even a prayerful mob.

It was not the old faith they sought
but a chance to keen its loss.
All deaths deserve their ceremony.
 
They would discover, on the scaffold
or hanged from a convenient oak,  
that a king’s mercy is a miracle

rarer than any crone with child,
than any risen Christ beckoning
from among the clouds of sunset.

Mine was an old God
long past his prime,

not quite gaga but gone to seed,
his mind elsewhere –

other galaxies, other worlds,
other species bred

from a universe once new
enough to surprise Him.

He gouged me from clay
like Adam but, bored,

left me only half made up,
a something being

with a sometime soul,
bereft of the hope and terror

that a proper creature
owes a proper creator.

His breath was feeble,
silted with crumbling leaves

and sweet with bruised fruit.
He wheezed me into life.