Sepideh Soltaninia
Mother Nature
God is a man, but
Mother Nature is a woman.
When I was younger, I used to wonder:
who cut the umbilical cord of God and proclaimed,
“It’s a boy!�
But then I remembered,
you can keep God in your gender, because
Mother Nature is a woman.
I thought it was because of the beauty
of her baby blue skies, or
the enticers of imagination
in the whites of her eyes.
Or how she could take a bulb to bloom
to become a bed for the bees
to come to be the fruit that
she bore from her bossom
to feed us.
Or was it how radiant she looked,
even in the mornings.
How her sunrays rolled across your bed,
tapping you on the shoulder,
showing you how smoldering
hot she was.
Or was it because, like every woman, she
had a wild side.
How she could shake the foundations of your world,
run circles around you or
engulf you in a wave of
untamed emotions.
Or was it because, like a mother, she
weaned us from the womb and
when she taught us how to walk
there was always and outstretched
branch to help us up, or her soft
sands to break our falls.
Or was it because she led
even the greatest of men to
discover her beauty and
uncover her curves by
walking all around her.
No, Mother Nature is a woman because we
walked all over her,
because like true children
we ate the fruit from her bossom and
spat it back in her face.
Mother Nature is a woman because she’s a
slut and a whore
who gave out too much
too often and cost
too little to abuse.
Yes we used her,
like a possession we had to tame,
and when like a grandmother
she offered us wisdom,
we manufactured it
into something that caused her pain.
Like a good wife she was
expected to give up all her needs
to please
our economic dreams.
All that anger we threw in her face,
she quietly absorbed,
in her veins, but now her
blood is rising, and
she can keep her calm for so long, but now
the cool at her poles
is melting.
We impregnated her
with the burdens of our artificially inceminated technologies.
Our industries kick at her sides,
putting pressure on the kidneys she once used to
purify the toxins that now roam in her blood.
As her feet begin to swell,
we know soon her water will
burst, breaking the levies we built to
contain her.
And we wonder why she
fights back so fiercely?
It is because we love her for her beauty and
not for her brilliance,
because instead of treating her
with our civility, we
implore the Lord’s humility
to control her.
But such calls are futile, because
God may be a man, but
Mother Nature is a woman.
Perhaps genderising both God and the universe itself is problematic because we make a lot of assumptions and stereotype too on who and what a woman is. This is a thought provoking poem nonetheless but I don’t believe in God being a man or the universe being a woman. Because if I do, I will go further to say God must be wicked because he is a man cuz men are patriarchal, they are destroyers and they invented all the weapons of destructions in the universe. That wont be a fair conclusion either…