“Well John, I once saw two angels flying in the midst of heaven, in perfect balance with light and gravity. Five times they circumscribed everything I am and ever have been, and they did it with smiles on their faces and sublimity in their hearts.”

Fellow conversing with John the Revelator

“Songbirds of spacetime,” Michael quipped,
as Mother and Mary drifted away from him.

They heard him scrunching a continent
with his thoughts, shoving upward,
forming pyramidal mammoths into
a limestone sash for the world—
towering like the Himalayan.
Michael knew
Jehovah with his tools would soon
come to grind down the slopes
and sprinkle in volcanic crystals—
to make the range seem ancient,
well-worn and Appalachian.
Only a full-fledged God could do
the finish work. Mother

and Mary had come down
where land and water wrapped
themselves into a globe, to make
the play setting as they called it.

“A thousand years to create
the appearance of billions,”
Mary quipped, gliding eastward
over an ocean. Gawking sons
of perdition scattered before
them,
more from shame than fear.
Mother kept silent, pondering
in her heart
for all the Gods to hear.

Let us shape rivers as veins
for a desert and its gardens.
She thought,
and it was good.

Let us sand plains and notch
hills with wind, blowing pockets
into strata for caves.
She thought,
and it was good.

Let us dress the coasts,
so the tides may honor
their shelves with reefs.
She thought,
and it was good.

Mary voiced the underside:
“Dendrites for plague blood.
Highways for ambushing
certain men, and terraces
for martyr-making empires…”

…and a manger, Mother added,
a landscape for parables to play
out upon. Moments agency makes
inevitable, we
and this land will make teachable.

Westward, half a globe away
Jehovah’s tools thundered,
humbling the continent
made for gathering.
Mary volunteered,
“Let us return and report.”

“Let there also be Wasatch,”
Michael cried from the west,
as perdition’s legion peered over
the world’s rim at the shining
brothers.

Mary smiled,
taking Mother’s hand
as the pair ascended
toward Elohim.
“Let them worry
about Missouri.”

Poet’s Notes:

The featured image for this post is a NASA TV screenshot I grabbed on October 18th. It shows astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir performing vital maintenance tasks during a 7-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. It’s been billed as the first all-woman spacewalk.

If you’d like to read a similar Mormon poem, try Premortal Life at Intermission.