Tuesday Poem: Theosophically Speaking

TerraDeus

What if we’ve been riding

the back of God, all this time,
like fleas on a dog?

What if Eden were just the earth

being itself  – a gift that kept on giving,

until Adam and Eve walked away
from right relationship,

began to collect things,
specialize, complicate their lives,
idolize themselves, take control

of both the growing and the harvest,

bending the land to a terrible scarification? 

The fall from grace being also a fall from place,
losing our place in the living fabric,
tipping the balance too far in one direction.
And haven't we been created in Earth’s image?

After all, we’re carbon-based,

and two thirds water,

our fluids taste like the oceans,

our rounded hills and valleys,

supporting colonies of creatures; prairies of hair.

We absorb heat and minerals.

We're electrically charged,
and subject to forces:

magnetic and gravitational.

We're made up of cell networks: complex

and symbiotic interconnections,
like the ecosystems we’ve just begun
to understand and sustain.

A butterfly flaps its wings; 

a typhoon is born,

a single cell goes rogue, 
and infiltrates others;

then they make war 
on the body’s defenses;

soon they’re sending out satellites, 
whole systems are crashing and burning, 
a constellation of madness

blights the body’s universe. 
It’s called metastasis.

Look, our veins are roots and branches,

our arteries like rivers, inlets, creeks.

Here, trace the leaf lines under your skin,

feel the magma in your belly,

how it reverberates.

Tune in to the pulsing at your temples.
It’s no accident we call them temples.

In them, we feel the life force

doing its work, the busy

humming origins of worship.

What if there’s no Heaven --

nothing but what we can see:

the oceans we’ve filled with plastic,

the clouds hiding holes in the ozone,

the glaciers our emissions are melting away?