Meditations on Natural Religion: A Poem

What is the religion of a star? 
Can man’s faith ascend so far? 
What is the philosophy of a leaf? 
Is it something we could believe?  
Can a mere man’s opinions of reality,  
Exactly correlate with a stone’s, a tree? 
Can he follow an Order as effortlessly supreme, 
As the shift from wintry gloom to summer gleam?  
Or are all his opinions just a brute construct,               
Cobbled together in a vain artifice to obstruct,               
The mysterious orgiastic terror of Nature?                    

As fresh blood drips from her claws and fangs, 
She dances wildly, on her neck skulls do hang, 
Her hypnotically enticing flesh in the raw, 
Savage beauty ancient and new, I’m in awe! 
One minute she thrills me with pleasures fine, 
On a whim she roars, then upon me she dines. 
Oh drunken cannibal goddesses of love and death! 
To your frenzied majesty I offered my tears, my breath.
For I see you lurking behind every quaint little flower, 
Every gentle stream bears the stamp of your power. 
So it seems when I gaze plainly on Nature’s surface. 

But when I consider spirals, cycles, an elegant pattern, 
I begin to wonder if there’s another meaning to discern. 
Is there something beyond this flux of death and birth? 
Does beauty betray a coded message hidden on earth? 
When I contemplate this I may feel like I’m dreaming, 
But sometimes I think I can peek past nature’s seeming, 
To a luminous universe of infinite harmony and bliss.     
What if nature’s purpose is really precisely this?                
To point towards a truth far beyond what’s physical            
Moon, star, and sun suggesting The Light indivisible.
So it seems when I try to gaze into Nature’s secrets. 

Does not order imply an orderer? Creation, a creator?                 
Is it He who will judge and weigh my life’s labour?                            
And grade my mad attempts at solving life’s puzzle? 
Is my conscience and intuition just His voice so subtle, 
Leading me on a path that is long, dark, hard, lonely but true, 
That I, even I, may see The Light All-Beauteous and Ever-New. 
Oh, dare I hope? What a fitting climax it would be to a life of philosophy. 
To directly perceive the transcendent beyond all descriptive grandiosity.
Were such spiritual things not and passionate madness were all,
I could be content, but I’d still eagerly listen for a mystical call. 
So I feel when my heart tries to listen to Nature’s voice. 

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