In right now there is reverence
deep prayer, an endless, thunder-throated,
steady dripping Love.
The shore waves sing a slow ballad in 7/8 time.
Good deaths are soft. A miraculous easing of release.
A shedding
a moulting
a fall, then surrender to moss and insect
to beautiful, fragrant rot:
With my body I nourish thee.
Or with a scream, to announce the end
before the snapped neck, the severed jugular
The feed, even as last breath releases:
With my body I nourish thee.
There are other deaths.
Reactive, angry, resentful.
Only humans die this way,
non-compostable, ungenerous
like broken plastic buckets
that can feed no one.
another death I can find no mirror for,
here among the trees, or in the song of the lake:
A human distortion again, since
This One is badly injured, but still alive.
You miss your mark, wound, then walk away?
You dishonour Love?
It is impossible to nourish anything with this
if you won’t claim it as yours, if you deny it release.
There is only hush and hesitation then. Wrongness.
The crows cannot gather the shining story.
growth stops.
So. I see her.
I will take my sharp knife
with proper gratitude and joy,
and release She you could not see
from the living, breathing world.
Since you cannot, I will make a good end for her.
She is willing, graceful.
With this body, I nourish thee.
NOTE: When I was a kid I used to catch and keep caterpillars in jars. I wanted to watch them be, save them from being stepped on as my grandfather used to do with righteous conviction.
The moment of this morning in the deep thunder rain was one in which I understood that nothing is static. Release through death is nourishment, which is then decomposition, integration back into the world – lessons from a lifetime deepened, woven back into the ecosystem. We are only small in this system, but we are many. There is in fact no use in the forest for glass jars, or plastic buckets; you can’t, even with philosophy and romance, separate death from life. To try is to distort, and cause harm.
Thanks for reading this.
