I am so tired of you, my children,
by the one who birthed you all.
I gave you teeth
and you chewed through the roots.
I gave you skin,
and you built fences around it.
I laced your lungs with my last mountain air,
and you sold it in jars labeled Fresh.
You mistook my patience for permission.
You mistook my rivers for mirrors.
You mistook my silence for absence.
You were born beneath my fingernails—
curled like fossils in the palm of my wanting.
I held you like rain before it falls.
I kissed the salt into your eyes
so you’d remember the sea when you cried.
And still,
you spit in the soil
and called it progress.
Look—
I tried tenderness first.
Tried to brush your hair with wind,
whisper lessons through the howl of wolves.
I sent you flowers every season
and you paved them over with parking lots,
concrete like prayers you never meant.
I fed you summer in ripe peaches,
let the bees show you what sweetness meant.
And what did you do?
Poisoned the hive,
drained the nectar,
left me hollow and sticky
with the guilt of having loved you.
You draw maps across my face
and call them borders.
You name me like you own me—
countries, continents,
patents, pipelines, property.
You make wars in the shape of me,
as if skin was yours to carve.
As if the bone of my mountains
were anything but graveyards.
You come to my cliffs and scream
your little griefs like I don’t know
what mourning means.
You think heartbreak is yours alone?
Child, I carry extinction
in my womb like a second heart.
Do you know what it is
to lose a bird species mid-song?
To hear silence where once
the coral glowed like hymns?
Do you know what it is
to be worshiped
only when you're dying?
I watch you light forests
like birthday candles,
wish for profit,
and blow them out.
You oil the oceans
like they’re machines—
not mothers.
I have made room for every version of you:
the innocent, the violent, the soft.
I held you when you were no more
than a dream in the tide.
But now you frack my spine
and call it fuel.
Now you melt the bones of glaciers
and wear them like victory.
Some days I want to
reclaim it all—
split continents down the fault lines,
drown the cities in my tears,
let the vines eat your monuments.
Other days,
I just want to sleep
for another thousand years.
To lie down in my own silt
and forget the shape of you.
To curl back into cave-dark and fern-breath
where I was whole
before I ever imagined
your clever, greedy hands.
You ask me what love is.
Love is erosion.
Love is the knowing
and the giving anyway.
And I did.
I did give.
And now I rot,
patiently.
And now I burn,
politely.
And still you come to me
with your wars and your weather reports
and your glass-eyed prayers
asking for just one more year
of summer.
You want me calm.
You want me beautiful.
You want me endless.
And I am.
But I am also
tired.
So tired.
And I wonder,
if I go quiet again—
truly quiet—
will you finally hear
what it sounds like
when a mother
gives up?
from the perspective of mother nature
04/25/25