So Long As Light Never Washed It Out

The Messiah, or, at any rate
The first credible, working model,
Showed up looking like God’s silhouette,

If God cast a shadow like an oak
In winter with a giant angel
Roosting broodily in its branches.

No one knew quite what to do with this.
Assumptions had been the Messiah
Would turn up in the form of a man,

Not some monstrous shadow with no source.
This Messiah, or, at any rate,
The silhouette people came to call

Their Messiah, got down to business,
Shadow flailing its wings and branches,
Gesticulating as if wind-blown,

And people started pilgrimages,
As people have always longed to do—
Escape, see the world, become transformed,

Bring back a medallion of some sort,
Some good stories got along the way—
And pretty soon the shadow had them

Eating out of its messianic
Implications of the world’s demise,
Escape, transformation of some sort,

Which was, in fact, the transformation
In itself, from a world of waiting
For a Messiah to come along

To a world where the Messiah was
An institutionalized shadow,
Entrancing when gesticulating.