All the Miracles

by Sarah Wetzel

Please St. Anthony, whether he’s dead
or alive, whatever the outcome, please, let them
find him by nightfall, said a weeping woman

on Fox evening news. Only five minutes later, my father
rang to tell me she was his best friend’s daughter
whose three–year–old son had wandered

into the Louisiana swamps where they still lived. It didn’t sound
like her, my father said, but it was her face,
her name. St. Anthony, the patron of lost things

and missing people. For days, hundreds of men
and women, helicopters, dozens of dogs and horses scoured
the wild, watery terrain near Bayou Teche. When two found

a sneaker near a small pond, they called in divers.
After three days, I told my father, the boy is dead. But that night,
a man armed only with a Bible and his best dog

spotted him asleep in the brush. God led me
straight to him, he told the cameras. When I asked about miracles,
my father once said, they are a path leading

out the grimmest war. Raised Catholic, my father
still remembers when the parish priest saw the Eucharist
become real human flesh. The next day, WWII ended.

In today’s paper, as well as the Louisiana miracle,
someone else’s child died in a fire; another unlucky boy
was accidentally shot in a drive–by. Reading over my shoulder,

the man next to me on the train to work said he’d once watched
a dead man come back to life. You should have seen
the doctor’s face. The look in his eyes, when he opened them.