Magnificat

When he had suckled there, he began 
to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms, 
but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet 
milk she could not keep from filling her, 
from pouring into his ravenous mouth, 
and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy 
feeding its own extinction . . . soon he was 
huge, towering above her, the landscape, 
his shadow stealing the color from the fields, 
even the flowers going gray. And they came 
like ants, one behind the next, to worship 
him—huge as he was, and hungry; it was 
his hunger they admired most of all. 
So they brought him slaughtered beasts: 
goats, oxen, bulls, and finally, their own 
kin whose hunger was a kind of shame 
to them, a shrinkage; even as his was 
beautiful to them, magnified, magnificent. 
 
The day came when they had nothing left 
to offer him, having denuded themselves 
of all in order to enlarge him, in whose 
shadow they dreamed of light: and that 
is when the thought began to move, small 
at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally, 
it broke out into words, so loud they thought 
it must be prophecy: they would kill him, 
and all they had lost in his name would return, 
renewed and fresh with the dew of morning. 
Hope fed their rage, sharpened their weapons. 
 
And who is she, hooded figure, mourner now 
at the fate of what she fed? And the slow rain, 
which never ends, who is the father of that? 
And who are we who speak, as if the world 
were our diorama—its little figures moved 
by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers, 
spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history 
under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity 
that no one any longer wants to see, 
excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds 
on air, grows daily on radio waves, in cyberspace, 
who sows darkness like a desert storm, 
who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms,
who touches the hills, and they smoke.