Ordinary Miracle
Rent from DeepDyve- Ordinary Miracle
I have mourned lost days when I accomplished nothing of importance. But not lately.
Lately, under the lunar tide of a woman’s ocean, I work my own sea-change: turning grains of sand to human eyes. I daydream after breakfast while the spirit of egg and toast knits together a length of bone as fine as wheatstalk. Later, as I postpone weeding the garden I will make two hands that may tend a hundred gardens.
I need ten full moons exactly for keeping the animal promise. I offer myself up: unsaintly, but transmuted anyway by the most ordinary miracle. I am nothing in this world beyond the things one woman does. But here are eyes that once were pearls. And here is a second chance where there was none. [End Page 17]
Barbara Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, received the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work, and in 2010 won Britain’s Orange Prize for The Lacuna. Her novel The Poisonwood Bible was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
