I don’t know how to say what words can’t catch:
The hill has lost its fog, the field its song.
I write to you with hands that lit the match,
And every choice that led me here, all wrong.

I’ve seen the herons leave and not return,
Watched silence settle, reed by patient reed.
No requiem—just absence we don’t mourn,
Starving a need we’ll neither name nor feed.

We paved the meadow where the fox once denned,
Rerouted rivers till they forgot the sea.
We taught our children they need not defend—
The world is endless, bountiful, and free.

Your fever rises and we check our phones,
Scroll past the flood, the fire, the silent reef.
You speak in typhoons, and we throw our stones—
As if your dying were a matter of belief.

Our children ask us what the winter was,
Why photographs show white where now there’s brown.
We practice answers—half-truths, lies—because
The truth would send the whole charade crashing down.

Maybe they’ll do what we could not begin,
Tear down the stories we taught them to believe.
Maybe they’ll build from rubble, ash, and sin—
And find, beneath the loss, a way to grieve.

What can I offer now but open hands,
A voice that shakes, a debt I can’t repay?
I come with nothing, guilty where I stand,
To say your name while you let me stay.

I’ll name the cedar, name the vanished snow,
The salmon climbing water running warm.
I’ll name the silence where the songbirds go,
And hold each name against the coming storm.

So this is all I have: a voice, a name,
The light diminishing, the air gone still.
I will not leave. I will not shift the blame.
I’ll stay until I can’t, and join the hill.