The world does not stop.
Its hands grind the hours to dust,
indifferent, relentless,
a machine that tears beauty from its roots.
They pave over wildness,
turn green to gray,
and laugh as they vanish into cities
built to collapse.
And I hate them for it—
for the way they pass by
what remains,
too blind to see the tender rebellion
of a wildflower rising through cracked stone,
the stillness of a hill beneath an endless sky.
At fifty-five miles per hour,
they reduce the infinite to a blur,
a place they will never touch.
But I love the quiet, the overlooked.
The way moss clings to damp stone,
the faint pulse of water through soil,
the hum of life in a field mouse’s frantic dash.
A single blade of grass,
standing unbroken beneath the frost,
carries more grace than the world
they call progress.
For I, too, am a speck of dust,
being ground down by causality,
spun within the great indifference
of all that moves and does not see.
And yet I persist—
a small thing against the weight,
an ember clutching at its warmth,
a whisper in the deafening void.
I want to scream,
not to stop the world,
but to make them see.
To make them hear the voice of moss,
the whisper of grass,
the soft rebellion of the unnoticed.
I want them to kneel
and lay their palms to the ground,
to feel what still endures beneath them—
not in grandeur,
but in the quiet things
that will outlast their noise.
Let them say I was hollow.
Let them call me bitter, or ruined.
But let them know this:
Every fragile thing that stood defiant
held a piece of me within it,
a weight to steady its roots,
a breath to fan its fire.
And when they forget,
as they always will,
I will remain in the places they passed,
small and unseen,
but unbroken.