“There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast…”  
                                           William Cullen Bryant

I don’t know much about God, Whitman said. 
Nor do I.
But I know enough of awe to say with Bryant,
There is a Power, 
Or as my questioning mind might put it, Surely there must be a Power—
     One that guides the same two Canada geese every year
To Stone Road pond 
To birth and nurture their brood;
     That guides the common murre to lay a single egg,
One per year, on some precipitous rocky ledge
Where sea storms send up raging waves,
And bald eagles come to hunt,
And to which the murre returns, always,
To its own egg, among those hundreds of other murre eggs,
Known to each bird by its distinctive spotted pattern;
     That makes a heart cell know to be a heart cell
And not a brain cell, and not a skin cell,
Sloughing itself off in due season,
     That returns those cells and those birds
And all of us
To dust
To mingle with the same chemical elements
That make up stardust.
     And so, I say again,
I don’t know much about God,
But surely I have seen
Mysteries enough
To know what it means to feel the expansive,
The sacred wonder
Of awe,
And perhaps that is all we know,
And all we need to know
Of God.