Calloused palms on the dead wood plough,
he grunts with the crickets dirt gospel, dusk sweat.
Then the sky splits open with a metal psalm.

Metal birds scream overhead,
bronze-feathered beasts with furnace bellies,
speaking in static tongues no prophet yet decoded.

He jerks like a gun misfired,
heart skipping a jazzed-out rhythm
wheat bows like it's seen God.

Idols split at the seams.
The gods arrive, riveted and winged,
their eyes are cockpit glass and heat sensors.

He kneels—half-prayer, half glitch in the flesh—
mud to shin, mouth to silence.
Nothing in his century fits what he’s seen.

II.
Fast-forward: the hive hums neon,
What was once a god now is named “routine,”
tickets, scans, complaints about leg-room.
Miracles shrink when they fit a schedule.
(Little is it that you give thanks)

But up there
in those belly-bright fuselages—
300 private lives in one tube of light.
every fuselage is a vein of stories
pulses, heartbeats, eyelids,
toddlers squirming, someone giggling,
a couple passing one earbud back and forth,
thumbs tapping glass,
life or death.


That’s sonder:
the quiet gospel of shared altitude.
A whole choir of strangers
humming different midnights
under one aluminium ribcage.

III.
Now it’s me.
Marrow humming from an insomniac run
fog curling like steam off a cup.

The street is a mausoleum of streetlamps.
I only hear my echo.

Then—low and slow— (lo and behold)
a silver juggernaut moans above me, (I would rather a woman but you don't get what you want)
soft as a lullaby.

I can’t see the passengers, but I know they are there:
proof of civilization stitched above the clouds,
(a comforting thought)
somewhere between sleep and sky.

My blood syncs to the jet sound,
and it says:
you are not extinct yet.
(swaddle my heart in a duvet)

There are lovers, stanzas
staring down at the same small city
counting porchlights from the clouds.
Coffees are ordered at 30,000 feet upove the air (upove the air)

IV.
So I run (My running is now entranced)
ghost-guided by that mechanical moon,
For I know that there are indeed mechanical moons.

Grateful.
For thunder in the shape of miracles.
For farmers who once raised torches.

For the way we file awe under “daily departures,”
for every godless bird that still flies true,
and for the voice stitched into the smog saying:


We are still here.