"God's Justice," by Anne Carson

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.
On the day He was to create justice
God got involved in making a dragonfly

and lost track of time.
It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows
as it set about cleaning the transparent case of its head.
The eye globes mounted on the case

rotated this way and that
as it polished every angle.
Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank
God could see the machinery humming
and He watched the hum

travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail
and breathe off as light.
Its black wings vibrated in and out.

+ Anne Carson
Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

Anne Carson is a Canadian classicist, poet, essayist, and translator. Her work is remarkably innovative, adventurous, and diverse, frequently exploring theological themes, with special attention to the bittersweet, ambiguous aspects of life and relationships.

In this playful, evocative riddle of a poem, Carson imagines God setting out to make justice — and making a dragonfly instead. Or is the dragonfly itself a kind of echo or image of divine justice, at once beautiful, mysterious, and profoundly different from human ways of thinking and being? "For my thoughts are not your thoughts,” God declares in the Book of Isaiah, “neither are your ways my ways."

In the poem, God creates — and also watches in fascination, beholding the dragonfly in all her intricate beauty and inner workings, humming and glowing. Carson nudges us along, daring us to imagine: What would justice be like for One who sees everything from every angle, who can be here and also there, now and also then, the One who makes the sprawling, spinning galaxies and also the delicate, quivering, powerful black wings?