Nature is a Heretic

The Heretic by Frank Craig (1906)

Prologue: The End

Life is not a play.
Not on words. Not on paper.
Life is a rapier.
It all depends on where it cuts you
      whether you live or die.

Act I: Heretics in Springtime

i -- The grain of yewtree leaves
rusting in the warm rain spoke to me
of the heaving breast of dalmatian pelicans
sleeping and of crickets dying, that once
loudly scraped their legs to signal the warming
of which larks sing:

      of anatolian churches in spring,
and the white-tailed eagles nesting in their turrets,
to joyful songbirds like the white-throated robin
and the brown fish owl, waiting on branches
dewed with silver for the day to begin.

ii -- But then I looked more closely;
of these birds soullessly shitting for
a living. How their stench rots the birches:
      and nature spoke to me:
Spring is a shitfest. While Autumn strangles
her parents, she said, and eats their bodies.

The brambling and the wagtail hide in Winter's
wings. Summer empties the fieldfare's nest.
They don't believe they were created as your
beautiful plaything. They know I will eat
you no matter who or what
you believe is listening.

Act II: The Intermission of Glory

i -- I looked horrified. Where is the glory? I asked.
The need for glory, she said, disrespects me;
as though I'm not enough of a mother.
The miracle is that there is rebirth in my rotting,
I don't need your worshipping to give you life.

Your basest fucking gives you my children,
and my righteousness is not purchased on a cross;
it doesn't exist on the price list of anyone's piety.
Believe in angels if you want, for they are here --
in my animals, vegetables and minerals.
Believe in them. Believe in me.

ii -- All things work together, that's the miracle,
and my glory isn't by the design of a male being.
It's my fertile, living nature that raises the dead.
Even if you can't see it, or feel it, the science
of my nature never stops working, near or far.
And look at me as I look on you instead:

For I am the poem you all look upon
that turns your constant fucking into preaching.
I turn poets who burn by their unfinished page
into sages who love what they can never learn,
      for beauty to them exists merely
in a fictional rendering of remembering.

Act III: The Limitlessness of Heresy

i -- You're a heretic, I said, and I am child of God.
She shrugged and said, If you are a child of God,
then my children are not a slave to religious fear.
Only by my grace, do you all live here freely.
Only heretics believe you all breathe the same air
of possibility where you are not limited by the binary.

She spoke. I listened. I saw no line was clear:
Life is dirt and sweat, and grotesque forms
of comedic timing written by nature.
But she won't reward you for believing in her
or kill you for not believing, either.

ii -- It opens you up to a reality that there are
no limits to the acceptances of her heresy.
I saw her sunshine is evolutionary currency
      of more than our biological melanin.
She places no human value to the colour of skin.
Goodness is in sustaining her balance

      by doing the natural thing, and her heretics
know living is a choice of responsibility.
They know life is the fucking of the fittest
and yet they protect their weakest; that's the glory
of a true survivalist: To believe in anything
with a direct experience. That's why a lark sings.

Epilogue: The Beginning

(but she did not hear
me tell her--
she was no longer listening)

For life is not a play
but a page, constantly overturned;
the fret of life is to rot
      in the ditches we open, where words are worms.

Words are germs.
Words are weeds.
Words are seeds.
Words are without deeds.
Words are wounds that bleed.

We scratch
at the earth. We scratch out
each other's eyes. The limits are few.
To her grace. To our greed. To you.

And no religion has stopped this being true
for thousands of years, and
the more you believe it, the less of you is true;

for the more you learn of scripture
the less you're you, after all,
and the more you're of words
that tell you what not to do;

and rather than focus on the rust
of bird droppings
we put trust in the Gods of Moses
and ignore

the windows of science
that are always open
      to every season nature sends;

(she lets the air in
so we can all breathe)

and the stones thrown
from unforeseen hands can come through
without breaking its glass:

a lesson no window of religion
      has ever learnt from its past,

since a horned Moses broke God's trust
and threw his covenant of stones
into Canaan's dust.

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