Crumpled up the mountains, he did,
And burst them from the ground.
He broke not a sweat, he did,
From this thought or the next,
Seas rising, boiling and turned
A Greasy Mix in his bowl.

Seasoned words to say again
What can’t be said in words
The ancient story of all that is
Told again to make it new,
To shape it to the minds of those
Now breathing the one breath.

And what to make of this anger
That storms across a flowered land
Or of this cold shoulder
Soon to nudge whole continents
Into the arms of a frozen night
Whose centuries will not bring sleep.

And dropped us down, he did,
Left without a clue but only signs
And reports in language we
Could only guess; left to finger
Our way through libraries and mother’s
Hymns of stories told long before we came.

Oh, sure, he smiled on this spot or that
And we took that beam to mean
How well loved were our numbers
As we raised cities from farms,
Carved up his ancient carapace
As though it were our own.

And smile we did and ground our
Shares to a point better
To flail this or that of our brothers
Whose sister or oils or cities
We might covet in the shadowy
Ballet we thought of as God’s Work.

But the hurricanes come here and
The ice melts there and rivers roll across
Their banks and the houses our children
Built in lands perhaps too low-
It will all be some distant day
In the path of crashing continents.

And His smile will spread over this creation
All his creatures, the many eyes with which
He sees how beautifully mountains fall
And glaciers churn.

Amen.