Fern I

Mother Nature put America in timeout.

The streets of Minneapolis burned

like a warning flare,

a signal fire lit by grief and fury,

by hands tired of being told to wait,

tired of swallowing smoke

and calling it air.

We were playing with fire

in the streets of Minneapolis,

standing up to the bully

from down the way,

a brute who wandered onto

the wrong side of history.

The bully had grown

too large for his name.

Fed by silence.

Watered by fear.

Dressed in the old costumes of power.

A giant without a single face,

a monster stitched together

from a thousand small permissions.

Even the children knew to

reach for stones

not to conquer,

but to be seen.

To yell,

Fire, fire, fire

instead of help

just to be heard.

But before flame

could teach the world

its final lesson,

before the spark

could kiss the tinder,

Momma came out onto the porch,

pointed to the sky,

and called us home.

Just stop by the store,

grab some milk.

You’re going to be here a while.

Grounded.

Time to think about

what you’ve done.

You, after all,

made the bully.

You fed him.

You taught him how to pout

and call it strength.

Now David must lift

yet another stone

and aim at a giant

with no single head,

an enemy that spreads

instead of falls,

a tyrant without a face.

They’ll say we’re exaggerating.

That a pack of feral,

hose-drinking kids, extreme leftists,

and a generation of pod people,

domestic terrorists, all of them,

could never topple

this regime.

What a bunch of

silly snowflakes.

She heard it all.

So she changed

the element.

Crystallized.

Transmuted her shards into

something shiny,

a silky strength.

She laid ice over the roads,

quiet over the cities,

a white hand on a burning brow.

Not mercy.

Medicine.

While human nature raged—

hot, righteous, reckless—

she arrived cold and vast,

ancient as glaciers,

older than our flags and our fights.

Fire is what we do.

Ice is what she does.

It keeps us from becoming ash.

This pause

between matches and gasoline.

The cooling of the fever.

A divine timeout

before we

burned

our own house down.

They will call it coincidence.

They will call it weather.

They will call it hyperbole.

A red herring.

Smoke and mirrors.

They said the fight was too big,

too abstract,

beyond the old stories.

Incomprehensible.

But the old stories know better.

When children forget

how close they are to flame,

Momma almost always

answers with frost—

While the cities burn,

she answers with ice.

A simple frozen spell.

Cold enough to stop the bleeding.

Cold enough to keep us

from torching what’s left

of the free world.

This is the pause

before the fever breaks.

The cooling

before everything burns.

Mother Nature does not pick sides.

When the worst of human nature

meets the best of hers,

she will always choose survival.

Hers.