Nature

I miss doing Erasure poems, since the White Out Wednesday Challenge was withdrawn.

I took a shot at the genre again, with an article from my favorite website brainpickings.org. The order of words as they appear in the original article have been changed, to create impact.

Meditate on this  …

 

What it means for nature to be “natural,”

a centerpiece of understanding

final and unavoidable

Yet, nature does not have

a mind of its own

it cannot tell us what to do,

only we can.

 

We wake slightly altered,

the person we were yesterday is dead

unconsoled by belief

so grief-stricken,

impressed by our own dismay

consumed by the experience of loss.

 

Our lifelong struggle

of our mortality and

that of our dread of it

with an edge of denial.

 

If we could think of ourselves

aspiring to be more God-like,

now we wonder what,

as animals without sin

we might aspire to.

 

Suffering is integral to the world

Nature seems to be like

quite at odds with

what or who we thought

we were like.

 

Original article 

How to Live with Death by Maria Popova

Image: nationalgeographic.com