On the domed ceiling God is thinking: I made them my joy, and everything else I created I made to bless them. But see what they do! I know their hearts and arguments: “We’re descended from Cain. Evil is nothing new, so what does it matter now if we shell the infirmary, and the well where the fearful and rash alike must come for water?” God thinks Mary into being. Suspended at the apogee of the golden dome, she curls in a brown pod, and inside her mind of Christ, cloaked in blood, lodges and begins to grow.
Jane Kenyon, "Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter, 1993" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.