Moon at Half Past Noon

Remember the chorus of dawn?
Not just birds, but a liquid sky fractured into sound,
a thousand throats stitching the dark with light.
Remember how the air was a sharp, clean gift,
and the wind carried stories from places we hadn’t been?

Remember the rivers?
Not just water, but sky, melted and moving,
turning over polished stones like quiet, cool thoughts.
They were muscle and shine, drinking the mountain’s light,
and their endless song was the first music we ever learned.

Remember the soil?
That deep, silent hold, the scent of life after rain,
a velvet that left its black signature on our palms
as we planted a promise of roots and tender green,
the taste of an apple warm from the sun.

We were the keepers of these things.
We built our homes in the echo of that song.
We painted with the colors of that world.
Our language was rich with its names:
meadowlark, glacier, waterfall, storm.

Then, a slow blur began to gather at the edge of things.
A faint, oily slickness on the rain’s wings.
A single missing note in the morning’s score.
We called it progress. We called it the next minute.
We busied our hands with smaller screens, brighter lights,
and the great, shining world became a story we simply left unread.

Our children learned the names from animes.
Their “forest” was a pixelated shape of green,
their “river” a simulated flow.
They felt a thumb pain for an entire planet,
a longing for a pulse their hands had never felt.

And then, the unraveling.
Not with a scream, but with a sigh.
The last light going out in a child’s eyes
as she realized the recording of the whale’s song
was all that was left of the sea.

It is gone.
The chorus is a fossil in the air.
The river, a scar.
The soil, a fossil.
And we are left in the stunning, sugar of silence,
hearing only the final, desperate question:

What do we become
when everything that made us
is just a memory
we weren’t brave enough to keep?