Woodpecker
The world is faced with challenges that all require a solution here and now. To be sure, there have always been problems humanity, and her natural siblings, the fauna and flora of our planet, have had to face through the centuries. In the distant past when there were volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, droughts and famines that we couldn’t even begin to explain, let alone protect ourselves against, our ancestors would attribute such calamities to angry gods, or to an angry God, presuming that it was punishment for something they had either done or not done. Sacrifices would then be in order.
And although natural disasters still visit us, we know much more about their workings today; we know their origin and we understand why they occur. As a result, we attribute their origin to the sole impulse of the physical world. Although there’s not much we can do to stop them, we are able to predict them, for one, and we have technology and scientific knowledge to survive some of their destructive muscle. In Japan, for example, tall buildings are constructed to be “rubbery”, so that they may absorb as much seismic wrath as possible.
The thing is that we are Homosapiens. Progress and discovery are wired into us. During the Industrial Revolution we started acquiring and applying knowledge and know-how enough to start altering the physical world we depend on, mainly by burning coal and thereby increasing the quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If anything, we were beginning to become gods, or God, endowed with the power to modify or obliterate Earth, as if we had hitched a ride inside it, like the Greeks did in Troy, and we are now coming out of our fake gift horse.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we are not alone in this space. The woodpecker still jackhammers the tree trunk; bees still waggle dance to share coordinates; flowers still bloom to attract birds and bees. The genetic urge to survive and bear offspring drives everything and everyone. This has always been true for the individual. But of late this natural phenomenon has proven to be in the throes of failure.
To romanticise things, let us say that the poet evolved not to set things straight but to make everything bare, like the emperor’s clothes. They point to things for us to better understand them.
One wonders to whose predicament such a prison for the non-human world can be likened to in the human world. Perhaps to the people who live close to that enduring world: the San of southern Africa, the Yanomami of South America, the first peoples of North America, and so many others who live inside and alongside nature, borrowing from it and giving back to it.
As we have seen, when things did not or do not go as expected (this continues to this day), humans tend to attribute incidents to deities or, in monotheistic religions, to a deity, a practice that birthed the idea of sacrifices, a sacrifice being a bid to appease an angry God.
One of the most famous incidents of a sacrifice in the Hebrew and Christian realm is the one of Isaac, the only son of Abraham and Sarah.
We are not going to belabour the point but instead let Jamaican American poet Geoffrey Philp tell it, in his poem Isaac’s Sacrifice, which opens with a difficult question: I wonder if he ever spoke to his father / again? Let us also wonder if the fate of our world and of our progeny lies in our hands or in the outcome of prayer and sacrifice.
Our species has the ability to either protect nature or destroy it; we have the ability to free the woodpecker from the cupboard it’s in and the blue bird from the solitary confinement of our hearts. Isaac’s father ended up not killing his son because God provided a goat for the ultimate sacrifice. Philp’s poem ends: What would have happened if / the old goat hadn't been so lost?
Who sacrifices their child? Are we or are we not in the process of sacrificing this rock we live on? It is evident that we indeed are.
If so, then Earth is our sacrificial goat at our killing altar, and the poets talking in the wind are false prophets trying to keep us from what we were put on this Earth to do. Or not.