The Quickness of Miracles Unbelieved

I look up and the clouds are sneaking away again. They are no better than foxes. Despite the thorns, the berries all go missing. It makes me think that, if I had one brief illness that kept me to my bed, I might miss the forsythia’s tantrum between our yard and the neighbor’s. Face it, the meteors are happening as we sleep, and the hummingbird won’t wait until you can grab a camera. Too slow, too slow—whatever got into the neighbor’s trash is already back inside its hole.









Charles Rafferty’s twelfth collection of poems is The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. He is an amateur archeologist and lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

See more of his work in issue 6.2 here.