“Thus the dead was brought to life again; thus the lost was found.” 
                 —A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant

The moment in which a mother cannot see her son, but a man 
sitting in the son-shaped space whose presence she feels
and fails to fill with grief’s ceaseless weeping. She tears
at the sight of not-him: an impossible figure as foreign
as the words of Christ-prayer tumbling from his son-
shaped frame. The moment in which the man needs a miracle 
to un-die, to recover his body from the lore of wolves and woods.
He regards himself a witness for God, but isn’t God the sole witness
of truths left yet untold? He stands before those who have made him
a stranger, an intruder, a dead man until proven brother: the hunter
and his king, the youngest and her kin. The moment they become 
indelibly linked through him—family by name, by blood, by faith—