Lily Tobias

This poem was written in response to the question, “What is a miracle?“

---

What Is a Miracle?

By Daniel Thompson

A miracle is a thing your grandmother tells you exists.
You are one of them, she says,
but must also perform them. 
No hands or feet but these.
Something more too;
a miracle is a thing which is prophesied.
A miracle is the thing she does when she touches your mother,
Speaking as quickly in the spiritual tongue as she does in Texas drawl
And it’s a miracle your brother and you don’t interrupt 
           the prayer with laughter. 
A miracle is a thing which doesn’t happen when it must.
It leaves your friends without a dad even though you 
           played piano for him 
in a crowd of a hundred people calling forth for his healing. 
A miracle is the quieter man his wife married a few years later, 
and the video you took of their wedding. 
It’s a miracle your dad bought a pickup truck so you could
haul a mower to the overgrown lawn of the dead dad’s unfixed fixer-upper 
and cut a path for weeks through a cancer of weeds til they’re tamed. 
(No hands or feet but these.)
You played Elvis in the cab — his voice a miracle too. 
A miracle is the wedding ring you lost while gardening and found 
at the very top of the rubbish pile right as the sun went down. 
It shouldn’t have been that easy. It nearly wasn’t. 
A miracle is a thing you lay hands for, anoint with oil for, 
pray for and then do not receive. A miracle gets you to ihop in time.
Miracles pick and choose. 
A miracle is a thing your sister talks about.
She’s certain they exist. She’s certain they’ll come. 
A miracle is the only thing that could get you back in church someday, 
but you never saw one there. You believed in them there. 
A miracle is a smirking goblin, a beam of light, a sign. A half-remembered 
dream of the place you are that tells you you’re where you should be. 
A bit of okra that fries just right. The loaf of the cat. That your brother’s 
           alive. 
A miracle is a thing for which you are grateful but for which 
           you never did ask. 
An eighteen-year-old tells you she might kill herself. 
You have no memory of what you said. 
Four years later she looks at you through a tv screen and says
Lo
Behold
I am healed.