Melbourne, Australia

REVELATA CELESTIA

I remember lying on a hillock
as a small boy with some friends,
watching the sky up above…

We are having a competition –
who would be the first to guess
which object each passing cloud
resembles most closely.

There goes a giraffe,
followed quickly by an elephant and a dog;
one looks exactly like our history teacher,
making us burst out in fits of laughter.

Another resembles for all the world
that girl in my class
on whom I have a secret crush
and so I say nothing,
letting my best friend win that round
with his claim that it looks just like a rotten potato.

Suddenly the clouds redden
and start to mold themselves into globular shapes,
identical in appearance to red blood cells.

I can even see within each cloud
the inner architecture a cell is comprised of,
the nucleus in the centre,
the mitochondria moving around the perimeter.

Not only does the appearance of the clouds change,
more than that,
the very nature of their motion
acquires a completely new aspect.

No longer are they drifting
in their usual random, pointless ways.

Instead they are now moving
with that unmistakable and inimitable sense
of purpose that only living matter
and all matter saturated with the breath of life,
from tiniest bacteria upwards, possesses.

Off in the far distance
an old grey-bearded man dressed
in flowing white robes is making his way
across a deserted field of grass
in a manner most inconsistent
with his advanced age.

He skips like a playful boy
and every few steps he jumps up high
into the air and does a complete rotation
with his decrepit body.

We hear him shouting out in high excitement,
he doesn’t even stop or look in our direction
but his words are clear and seemingly
reverberate all the way to the horizon:
“Don’t you see, Boris?
This is the long-awaited sign from Him Up Above!
God, too, is The Son of Man!
God, too, has blood rushing through His veins!
I can now die in peace,
knowing that the Prophecy has come to pass!”

© Boris Glikman