in fifth grade CCD, my teacher gave us leaves:
blotchy red and purplish, bigger than my hand.
they might’ve come from just beyond the classroom window,
from the sugar maple waving like an old friend
in the damp saturday morning breeze.
my teacher told us to meditate on God through our leaf.
when i told my mother later, she squinted like i had,
concerned we were being taught fluffy feelings,
not Truth. and yet,

a few years later, fresh out of middle school,
i understood. i pored over pages from a chapter on plant parts:
i found His hands’ work not only in the veins of a leaf
but in the water and sugars within them,
in the xylem and phloem that make up their walls.
the chlorophyll, the stomata. the gases they and i exchanged
as i sighed, then laughed at my teacher’s tricks to remember organelles,
her freckles dancing by the tugs of her smile.

she and i too bear those signs:
order in the midst of seeming chaos.
our own arteries branching out to bear life
to the farthest ends of our flesh. our bone structure protecting
as much as it raises up. the flecks in our eyes only barely hiding
their resemblance to the universe, to the stars, meteors, galaxies
made for us. we find ourselves on this pale blue dot
not by chance, but by hope—a hope that we’d seek,
and so would find, in its precision, its splendor,
the fingerprints of Love Itself.