Stone from Inside

We know the flowers' story, brief and bright,
how the roots run the show sending auxins from the dark.
We see the wind's hand stroking fields and hillsides.

The brain is no flower and the spine no stalk but they bloom.
Wouldn't you call feeling and cognition a blossom? I do.
When the lily dies its juices drain back to the bulb. Is next
year's blossom the same lily? We'd like to think so.

The roots of superstition mean overstanding, I don't know why,
perhaps in contrast to understanding. We take stances inside
something we're part of. We're at least no bigger than, at most
identical with, the whole thing. Since we think and feel, it must,
somehow. Does the whole thing have beliefs, are we them?

Dirt is chewed up rock. Most of a plant's mass, after water
pumped from the roots, is atmospheric carbon. We eat plants
and other planteaters. Flesh arises from stone and out of thin air.

The idea of a big guy outside who built it all feels just too silly,
exactly what a deferential chimp would think.
But some divine soil we grow out of, up in, that works.

The most it can cost to be wrong is one life at a time,
the big thing goes on. Wind scours the rock with rain
and little by little, or all of a sudden, rock relents.