Li Hua

Those of us who had known the small of the earth,
The bodies of its inhabitants,
And the riddles of the end,
Took longer to trust the machines.
So when we arrived,
We looked foolish,

But because we knew the earth,
We became gods.
Does not the mythology of the Internet Age
Begin in the central plains of Illinois,
Where the Missouri and Ohio and Wabash and Mississippi
Converge at Cairo?

He was born the son of a virgin,
In a town of no reputation,
Just north of the great delta upon which an empire was built
Upon the backs of slaves.
Let he who rises first declare himself to be the Messiah,
Our faces will be carved into stones.

As it turns out,
Galilee was a likely place for a radical of that kind to be born.
And all the other man ever really said about himself
Was that he was.
But mostly Jesus was just a do-gooder
Who decided to make a very political statement in a very public place.