The Sundew and The Star

Image credit Sirion Pierce @nativefocusphotography

The Sundew and the Star

The cacophonous roar of brutal truths, 

clashing in the airwaves

like disembodied necessities for certainty.

Blunt and blind and colliding through flesh, 

sacrificing soul,

a barbed penetration of subtle emergence,

a lambasting of nuanced sensing,

a desecration of co-creative immanence. 

Inside, I feel the urgent imperative to find the dial,

that would diminish the volume 

of viral self-righteousness.

My desensitised ear pressing instead

into the humus of understory, 

I notice the Sundews there, 

emissaries in the wintering cold, 

heralding their trumpeted listening, 

gathering dew and nectar and spore, 

communicating in the silent night with the stars.

Their stems are hair fine,

and themselves covered in filamented receptivity,

poised to imbibe the news of insect’s feet.

Here too from beneath the decaying leaves, 

the fungi, 

blooming their varied hue,

their perplexity of texture

luminous translucence,

amniotic gloss,

feathered underside.

Themselves the blooming, fruited moment

of the vast mycelium that thrives beneath,

the voluminous mythic underpinning of creation,

the transmuting multiplicity, 

the connective tissue of the universe, 

responding, 

in unfathomable sensitivity.

The earth, 

always so gracious in her capacity 

to accomodate polarities, 

to make space for complexity, 

to house the unknown and the unknowable.

Every inch of her deep skin

a eulogy to the dying, 

a murmurating coo to the newborn, 

a sustenance to everything that lies between.

So generously she harbours the ungamely

and the as yet not fully formed, 

carving refuges for uncertainty and contradiction, 

for the myriad stories of her fruitfulness, 

creating a cohesive weave of kindness and care.

Listen, can you hear it, 

the resonant song of sundew and star.

They have been conversing for millenia, 

and still they seek not 

the limitations of a fixed 

and uniformed certainty? 

Could the star define the sundew,

Or the sundew, the star? 

There is a secret language 

written like brail across the surface of the universe.

May we grow the fineness of feeling 

in our sacred fingertips,

sensitive like a moths feeling for the moon,

to decipher the hidden meaning 

of the rich multiplicity 

of our layered existence.

Text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021