The poem is a lyrical meditation on the wonder of divine provision. Drawing from biblical images (sparrows, ravens and widows, manna, water from the rock, Daniel in the lions’ den, Shadrach and his friends in the furnace, Sarah’s laughter, restored lepers, multiplied loaves), it celebrates God’s miraculous, often extravagant care for His people.
It portrays a God who turns scarcity into abundance, danger into safety, and emptiness into overflowing grace. Nothing is wasted in His economy; even tears and lost years are redeemed. The tone is one of stunned gratitude before the “scandalous arithmetic” of a Provider who refuses to let His own go hungry, leaving the speaker (and reader) in speechless awe and worship.
The sparrow lifts on a wind it never earned,
wings tipped with light that was not its making;
it drinks from a puddle cupped in broken stone—
a chalice the storm forgot to shatter.
A widow counts two coins that should have been one,
yet the jar keeps breathing flour, the jug keeps bleeding oil;
the prophet’s raven drops bread like dark forgiveness
on a fugitive hiding from his own prayers.
Out of the cracked heart of a rock, water remembers
how to be generous;
manna falls like slow punctuation
in the long sentence of the wilderness.
Even the lions in their hunger learn restraint
when a man stands in their den humming psalms;
the fourth figure walks the furnace, unconsumed,
cooling the flames with the hem of mercy.
See the childless womb that suddenly laughs,
the prisoner whose chains fall off like old skin,
the leper who reaches, and instead of losing a hand
finds it wrapped in new flesh.
Nothing is wasted—
not the five loaves, not the tears, not the years eaten by locusts.
He keeps every sparrow in a ledger of love
and every hair numbered like stars in a private sky.
So we stand, beggars who wake up rich,
carrying empty cups that keep overflowing,
stunned into worship by the scandalous arithmetic
of a God who will not let His own go hungry.
Amen.