"Miracle Fish," by Ada Limón

I used to pretend to believe in God. Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark. Think of how far a voice must have to travel to go beyond the universe. How powerful that voice must be to get there. Once in a small chapel in Chimayo, New Mexico, I knelt in the dirt because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. That was before I learned to harness that upward motion inside me, before I nested my head in the blood of my body. There was a sign and it said, This earth is blessed. Do not play in it. But I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die. I relied on a Miracle Fish, once, in New York City, to tell me my fortune. That was before I knew it was my body’s water that moved it, that the massive ocean inside me was what made the fish swim.

+ Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the most recent Poet Laureate of the United States, the first Latina to be so named. On one level, “Miracle Fish” is a meditation on letting go of childhood ideas about God and religion, and taking up more grown-up notions of self-reliance (Limón has sometimes called herself a “spiritual atheist”). But there’s something else going on here, too, at once more serious and more playful.

What the poem’s speaker relinquishes is, first, a view of God as located somewhere else (“beyond the universe”) only reachable by a powerful voice traveling far, far away; and second, a dour sort of religion that requires kneeling on the earth but forbids playing on it. And on the other hand, what the speaker embraces here is a playful, inward, embodied strength: harnessing internal “upward motion,” nesting in one’s own body, and acknowledging “the massive ocean inside me.”

Limón compares this shift in perspective to an experience with a child’s toy, the “Miracle Fish,” a thin slice of fish-shaped plastic that wiggles and “swims” when placed in your hand (check it out here). The plastic wiggles, it turns out, as it interacts with the tiny droplets of moisture on your palm. It’s that moisture — it’s you! — that makes the fish swim.

And here’s the thing: this perspectival shift is central to Jesus’ teachings. No powerful, far-flung voice is needed for prayer, for God isn’t somewhere far away, but rather is right here, right now: “the kingdom of God has come near to you,” Jesus proclaims (Luke 10:9), and “the Kingdom of God is within you” (or “among you”; Luke 17:21). Even a whisper will do. Even silence, or action, or listening in the dark.

As Jesus tells it, God is by no means merely “beyond the universe,” but rather is also so closely present to it and active within it as to be continually caring for it, feeding the birds and clothing the flowers, not to mention you and me (Matthew 6:25-30). Likewise, when it comes to playfulness, Jesus delights in blessing children, and then admonishes his grown-up disciples that unless they become like children (playing on the earth, indeed!), they will never enter God’s realm (Luke 18:17). Moreover, in the healing stories peppered throughout the Gospels, Jesus’ signature send-off isn’t “Behold! I have healed you!” but rather: “Your faith has made you well.” (That is: It’s you!)

Here and there in “Miracle Fish,” Limón hints at this deeper level, a more satisfying spirituality than the one she rightly leaves behind. The earth she vows to play on, after all, remains “this blessed earth.” And in her newfound perspective on that plastic toy, it won’t do to say simply “my palm’s moisture” did the trick. The culprit is something grander, something much more epic and unwieldy, a “massive ocean inside me” that no-one — not the poet, not the reader — can fully fathom, explain, or control. We can only marvel, wonder, and swim. That’s what miracles make us do. That’s what miracles are for.