We came into a world already sold,
the air itself was portioned, priced, and spent,
our futures pawned before we had grown old—
we never asked where all the winters went.

Our mothers said the warming had no name,
our fathers traced the shoreline, raised the wall,
the elders passed their silence down like blame—
we grew up learning not to ask at all.

We married under skies the color of rust,
had children where the tideline kissed the street,
and when basements filled, we said we would adjust—
we turned the music up to drown the heat.

The scientists sent data, graphs shaped like screams,
the poets wrote of endings none would read,
we blamed the models, called the numbers extreme—
scrolled past the warnings, comforted, relieved.

We said they’d fix it, our leaders would care,
we fed the world into a burning sky,
and passed the debt along, with time to spare—
while glaciers, reefs, and rhinos drifted by.

Then what we’d long submerged rose to the light—
I saw myself reflected in the flood,
the faces of our children, pale and slight,
and felt the water thicken into blood.

Now grief, that old animal, makes its bed,
it kneads the dark, it breathes against our neck,
I feed it with the names of all our dead—
and wake each morning to the deepening wreck.

And still we breathe, the fish who learned the sea,
we move through currents we ourselves have made,
and what we broke we cannot now break free—
we breathe the debt, the cost, the choice, the trade.