Desiccation
Catholicism was a delightfully graphic religion.
As a child, my Sunday was spent kneeling at the feet of a holy corpse.
Giving testament to the divinity that exists from mortality,
and one’s concept of overcoming it.
The religion did not entrench itself to me,
but I still kowtow before the grim celestial.
It’s found between the dry and the rotted bark of trees resting under the sand.
In the white blooms of fungus feeding on the forgotten things of this world.
In the mouths of vultures as they translate flesh back into the earth.
I have seen enough resurrections to stop calling them miracles.
It is impossible for bodies of tissue and greenery to disappear.
We can not be evicted,
tossed over the great precipice of this world or the next.
Simply, we adopt new liturgy
pulling the centuries over our shoulders like a cloak.
We die at the root to bloom at the crown,
a slow, green river flowing through the skin of time.
Never leaving the rock,
just ever changing these garments.
Traded from carpet to stalk,
from spore to dust,
we spin the wheel of a thousand lives.
What looks like decay is only the turning of the earth.
I have been here since the first rain fell,
and I will be here when the mountains turn to sand
patient,
ever shifting,
returning to ourselves.
The saints I trust do not wear halos.
They drink light until it blackens into rings of age,
receive confession without absolutions.
Even Christ,
nailed high above the altar,
was always more convincing to me as just the body of a man.
As there is no death here,
only the weight of our impermanence.