We wake again this morning almost five years past
that clouded-over spring-eve day when our daughter,
our one and only daughter, died, all of her gone,
her body racked by cancer pain and her soul
that begged to live, that asked more than once not to die,
that had the Colombian priest pray over her,
that held Sister Sarah’s hand through many prayers
and still twisted and moaned and died in morphine’s dark.
Two Pentecostal friends on different days beseeched
their living God for her, dropped to their knees beside
her bed, laid their hands on her, and begged for her
to be lifted up in health. Such brazen supplication
so unlike the visitations of the doctors
and their soft-spoken, nearly silent certainty
about treatment options and palliative care.
How do you believe what you cannot see—God
or tardigrade, the Holy Spirit or muon,
the promised bliss of heaven or the pervasive
expanse of dark matter filling up empty space
between the stars and among the bits in atoms?
We cast our faith to the unknown, needing anchor,
when what we have is not enough to satisfy,
when we don’t know what is happening to our loved
ones or what we must do to save them.