Are the Kids Still Dreaming?

The dinosaurs didn’t see it coming—  

that hot fist from the sky,  

the shudder of earth’s bones breaking,  

the long, slow hush of everything after.  

We, though, we stand in the wreckage  

we built with our own hands—  

factories coughing up black ghosts,  

oceans swallowing plastic whole,  

forests skinned to the quick.  

Still, the children dream—  

of clouds that do not choke,  

of rivers that do not burn,  

of trees older than memory,  

of a world not borrowed, not spent.  

We tell them bedtime stories  

of ice that never melts,  

of bees thick in the air,  

of tigers prowling, wild and gold.  

And they believe us.  

For now.