Science of Life, Class in Session (Sonnet 2087-2088) – Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets

Nature doesn’t kill anybody,
nor does it save anybody –
life and death are human constructs,
just like beauty and the grotesque –

nature is above all that,
not in an almighty, all-knowing
sort of way, but more of
an indifferent sort of way –

because in nature, nothing’s born,
nothing dies, they just change shape,
and some of those shapes are sentient,
some intelligent, some neither –

and each identity gets restructured
as they go through the shape-shifting,
which includes restructure of sentience,
or non-sentience, as the case may be.

Same elements that make the nonsentient stars,
when they change shape into organic material,
such as humans, they produce sentience,
but as a human corpse decay into nature,

those elements get absorbed into the soil,
into trees, bugs, and all sorts of creatures,
thus they seep into a diverse range of
sentient and nonsentient materials –

and thus the cycle continues,
from the birth of the universe
till the end of the universe –
beyond that, I don’t know – nobody does –

it doesn’t matter what happens after,
what matters is, how you behave now.