The fox sleeps where the permafrost held when your father was a boy.
The sparrows chase a warmth that isn’t there—spring’s shattered joy.
The salmon circle water that’s too warm to let them spawn.
The animals don’t argue. They just leave, or they are gone.

The raven remembers when the glacier spoke in groans and cracks.
It nested in the old growth once, before they cleared the tracts.
Now it roosts on power lines and waits for us to pass.
It has no word for what we’ve done—but knows we will not last.

We knew it in our bodies first—the summers that wouldn’t break,
The springs that came with fever, the winters that wouldn’t take.
We named it weather, named it fluke, named it chance, named it grace.
We made our peace with what we’d done. The raven held its gaze.

The power grid went down in June and didn’t come back on.
The highways buckled in the heat; the maps we trusted, gone.
The raven sat on the dead stoplight, watching the cars stand still.
We’d built a world that needed cold. The heat crept in to kill.

The last road sign fell years ago. The river moved the bridge.
The deer walk through the living rooms along the broken ridge.
The raven perches on a roof that’s slowly giving way.
There’s no one left to name the loss. The deer don’t look away.

The raven will be here when all we built has blown away.
It circles where the cities were, and lands where concrete lay.
The earth will grow its silence back, slow root and patient vine.
We were not meant to keep it. It was never ours by design.