The Religion of Birds
       

Everywhere people are mad for miracles.
They search their coffee cups, dunk babies
in holy water, pay 25 bucks to learn
to destroy silverware with only their minds.
Nothing is an accident, a friend assures me,
everything happens for a reason:
a divine CEO neatly matches personal ads,
zaps deadly tumors into tension headaches,
serves as the spokesperson for cellulite cream.
Even as a materialist, I sympathize with them,
the non-believers, the too-good-to-be-truers.
What do you call a flower that prunes itself,
a factory that produces butterfly kisses?
In movies, every house with character
must be inhabited by a throng of ghosts,
every brilliant opera must become a cartoon.
If Pinocchio never had strings, would he
yearn for them? Like spiteful wizards,
we know the threat of love and turn it to stone.
Only the believers are truly contented
to practice the religion of migrating birds,
to glide into a winter they cannot survive.

Copyright © 2009 Megan O'Reilly Green All rights reserved
from The Beaded Curtain
Spire Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission