they’d build a different kind of altar.
Not of gospel, gold or greed.
But sand, sun and stardust.
They’d gather where the tide pools teach
the patient art of adaptation,
where tide and time have carved cathedrals
from nothing but persistence.
They’d bow before the ancient light
that traveled billions of years to reach
their upturned faces, carrying stories
of worlds that died before Earth dreamed.
Their hymns would be the hum of atoms,
the secrets that electrons share
as they leap between their shells.
They’d celebrate the sacred chemistry
that turns sunlight into sugar,
sugar into thought, thought into love.
We are the universe learning
to marvel at itself.
And in their reverence for what is,
rather than what might be,
they’d find infinity
in the endless depth of now.
