I ask each of the icons above my desk
a personal question: That nimbus around
your solemn head-is it gold beaten so air-thin
it’s only a wisp of wafer, like the round
leaf of fiber floated onto our tongues
at the alter? A circle-in a wedding ring
it speaks for a union without flaw. But if
it gets worn, lost, broken, may it be mended?
And the moon, fat as a pearl, a grape, a wheel
of cheese-in two weeks gnawed away a bit more
every night, like a wheat cracker, by
the mice of heaven-by what mystery is it fleshed out
to roundness like the planets the suns?
At Eucharist the priest holds high, in his thin
hands, a disc almost as big as a dinner plate.
He bends this little sun vertically in half
and half again; it cracks each time with a sound
that splits the sanctuary like a sharp arrow, and us
with it. We take this broken Son onto our tongues,
swallowed, into our gut. Eating, we are made whole,
as we join bodily the holy Circle of God.
-Luci Shaw, from: What the Light was Like
peacocks for pilgrims 