Poem of the day

Miracle at Cana

What's seldom said about the miracle
At Cana is that too much wine was made.

Consider, Jesus tells the waiting servants
To fill six pots with water, each pot holding
Two or three firkins, about twenty gallons.

The liquid then drawn out is found to be
Wine of choice vintage, and the bridegroom's praised
For keeping back the best stuff till the last.

But six huge pots, each holding twenty gallons,
Would make nine hundred pints (stronger than beer)
With sixty more for luck. Remember also
This wine is called for only when the guests
Have drunk the booze the bridegroom has provided,
So that presumably a merry time
Has been already had by everyone.

What need to drown in more wine than enough?
The reason, so some say, is Messianic.
The new age was to be an age of plenty
And Israel's saviour might well usher in
The good times with a great feast for his people.

What better place than Cana for its start
And at a wedding too? The world's a wedding
As we all know, some of us more than others,
And all like wine, some more than others of course.

And yet, it seems to me, an irritation
Shows in what Jesus answers when his mother,
Beside him, nags and worries at his sleeve:

"They have no wine." "Woman, what's that to me?"
Wasn't he fresh arrived in Galilee
From that Dead Sea encounter with the devil
Where starving from a fast he had been tempted

To turn stones into bread to feed himself?
"My hour is not yet come." There, can't you see
The shrug with which the son has turned away,
Leaving his mother to instruct the waiters
To do whatever he might say they should?
Perhaps it was indifference, nothing more,
Turned water into wine that day at Cana,

Either divine indifference or just knowing
water can taste like wine when you are drunk.

ROBERT NYE