Miracles Never Cease

Movie night at home
I take the bag of popcorn
Out of the microwave
Pinch the edges and pull
Watch the steam rise
Pour into a bowl
And there she was,
The Madonna,
Among the kernels
And the puffed starch
The mother of Jesus
In my bowl
I should have shrined it off
Charged admission to pilgrims
That would come from far and wide
But I had a movie to watch
And in truth,
As far as salt and butter was concerned,
She really didn’t wear it that well.

A picnic in the park
On a sunny Saturday
With the family
I reach into the basket
Blindly grope for a stick
Pull one out
Look down and exclaim,
“Christ on a corndog!”
The kids ask, “What's wrong?”
As if it had been an expletive
The batter thicker near the end
More baked or burnt
Had miraculously sculpted
The face of Jesus
I carefully use a butter knife
To remove the end.
Upon returning home
I asked the whereabouts
Of the napkin with the piece
Of corndog, only to be told
My wife, not knowing what it was
Had fed it to the dog.
Three days later the dog
Threw up on the carpet
And as I was cleaning it up
I was thinking anything but
RESURRECTION!

Around midnight I got up
Wanting a drink of water
By a simple miscalculation
I kicked the leg of the table
You can call it an eleventh-hour
Conversion, but I saw God
In the darkness as a blinding light
I feel to my knees in pain
I pleaded and prayed,
“Oh God take this pain away
And don’t let my toe be broken.”
The pain left enough that I could
Think of other things
I returned to bed
Under the warm covers
And snuggled up behind
My wife, which was to me
A kind of heaven