Four Thoughts about Miracles

                             Fall sun
passes through the wine.

--Jane Kenyon, "September Garden Party"

**

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable fact? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvellous is indeed an aspect of the real?

--Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

**

And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.

--Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, translated by Mark Fried

**

The End of the Season

Dawn Potter

I drive into the dark.

The World Series sputters on the radio.

In the backseat my son weeps

and a girl holds his hand.

It is late autumn.

The eyes of cats glint along the roadside.

Jagged clouds frame the setting sun.

The sky is a riot of colors—lemon, salmon, plum—

and now soccer season is over.

The winners have taken their victory laps across the field.

Our losers have scattered into cars,

stunned and deflated.

Startled sparrows fly up from the grass

as my car rattles westward.

Chimney smoke threads from window-lit capes,

from tidy ranches and collapsing trailers.

Soon,

at the strike of a shovel,

the earth will ring like a tamped bell—

muffled, ironbound.

The season is over.

My son weeps in the backseat

and a girl,

dear tender apprentice of love,

quietly holds his hand.

Oh, the small tragedies.

In the moments we live them,

they are blacker than roads.