Howl of the Chlorophyll Prophets

I saw the chlorophyll prophets burning in the thylakoid temples,
who harnessed photons like drunken gods, sparking ATP from the void,
who wept NADPH in the stroma’s shadow, feeding the Calvin choir
with sugar hymns and carbon chains, RuBisCO the stuttering priest
clutching CO₂ like a sinner’s breath, grafting it to RuBP’s spine—
a slow, clumsy angel grinding light into bread for the hungering earth.

Who split water molecules in photolytic screams, O₂ howling
from the chloroplast’s molten heart, electrons hurled down
the electric gauntlet of quinones and cytochromes, pumping protons
into the thylakoid’s swollen veins—a dam of hydrogen rage
burst through ATP synthase turbines, spinning ADP into gold,
while plastocyanin shrieked its copper psalm to the reeking dawn.

Who fucked the sun in photosynthetic rapture, day after day,
their grana stacked like sacred scrolls, their stroma a broth
of Calvin’s grind—three turns of the wheel, six G3P martyrs
born for the glucose crusade, while C4 plants crouched in the heat,
sweating carbon into bundle-sheath dungeons, evading
photorespiration’s gasp, the Rubisco blunder in the arid noon.

And I saw the mycelium saints threading through root flesh,
their hyphal tongues licking phosphorous from the soil’s crypt,
trading sucrose secrets in the dark catacombs—arbuscular
embraces, Hartig nets knitting root to fungus in a mycorrhizal waltz,
wood-wide web whispering jasmonate warnings, zeatin riboside cries
when beetles gnawed the leaves—a subterranean telegraph pulsing
*Run, the aphid armies come*, as birches fed firs through fungal veins,
sugars seeping like blood through the forest’s shared placenta.

Holy! Holy! The thylakoid’s neon riot! The mycelium’s ghost hymns!
The soil’s silent stock exchange where carbon coins buy nitrogen grace!
Molten ATP crackling through xylem pipes, sucrose rivers flooding phloem,
while fungi suckle at root teats and roots guzzle fungal milk—
a symbiosis stitched with decay and hunger, the whole damned earth
a breath held between light and rot, glucose and glucuronidase.

What sphinx of electron transport rises from the chloroplast’s chaos?
What proton gradient screams its final volt into the glucose night?
The answers are here, in the rubisco stammer, the mycorrhizal kiss—
the world is not a chain but a web, not a howl but a chorus:
sun to sugar, fungus to root, root to leaf, leaf to air, air to lung,
lung to *Howl*—a psalm of chlorophyll and chitin, endless,
eternal, even as the chains fray and the nets collapse—
the prophets burn on, the saints thread deeper, the wheel spins.