The Quiet Ledger of the Earth

The Quiet Ledger of the Earth

We built our towers out of borrowed breath, And paved the meadows where the waters slept, Unmindful of the slow, unhurried debt That every fractured riverbed has kept.

We measured progress by the rising smoke, And traded ancient shade for fleeting gleam, Forgetting how the highland glaciers spoke In silver syllables to feed the stream.

Yet look—the soil remembers how to mend, Beneath the ash, a stubborn root holds fast; The monsoon clouds still gather to descend, And spring reclaims the concrete of the past.

No distant savior walks the warming land, No silent miracle will turn the tide; The cure is resting in the human hand, In what we choose to shelter and provide.

To plant a sapling where the dust has blown, To guard the fragile wetland and the tree— We do not own the earth we call our own; We merely hold it for the yet-to-be.