This House is on Fire

By Breckyn Forcey

The earth is running a fever
and we keep handing her
thermostats made of money.

She is sweating salt
from melting glaciers,
and we call it economic growth.

She is choking
on carbon confetti
from the after-party
of every oil exec's yacht.

And still,
they tell us
“Don’t worry.
The market will adapt.”

Adapt to what?

To oceans swallowing cities
like unpaid debts?

To forests coughing up
their last green breath
while billionaires
invest in bunker real estate?

This house is on fire.
And we are being asked
to reuse our shopping bags
while corporations pour gasoline
in the name of quarterly earnings.

They blame us
for plastic straws
while they spill
entire pipelines into the sea
and call it
a minor inconvenience.

They say
climate change is complicated.
But I think it’s simple.

They’re killing the planet
because they’re making money doing it.

Because oil doesn't cry
when the coral turns white.
Because coal doesn’t beg
when hurricanes grow teeth.
Because the stock market
doesn’t drown
when Bangladesh does.

They tell us
the Earth is resilient.
But resilience is not immortality.
It is exhaustion
worn as armor.
It is wildfires
that don’t ask permission.

I have watched
the sky turn the color of warnings.
Watched smoke paint sunsets
we’re not supposed to survive.

I have watched
children draw suns
with gray crayons
because they’ve never seen
a truly blue sky.

I have watched
islands disappear
from the maps we teach in school
and still
the curriculum says
“climate change is a theory.”

But this is not theory.
This is elegy.

This is glaciers
writing goodbye letters
in meltwater.

This is polar bears
drowning in documentaries
we stream between sitcoms.

This is crops failing
in countries we won’t pronounce
until they start
sending refugees.

This is extinction
in slow motion
set to elevator music
in a boardroom.

And still,
we are told
to keep calm.
To innovate.
To wait.

But we are past waiting.

We are past polite petitions
and compost campaigns
that look good on Pinterest
but do nothing
for the rising tide.

We need more
than virtue signaling.
We need legislation
that bites.

We need a planet
that doesn’t come
with a countdown.

We need to stop asking
“What kind of world will we leave our children?”
and start asking
“What kind of children will this world leave us?”

Because they are watching.
With lungs still soft
and questions we don’t know how to answer.

And somewhere,
in a sun-baked field,
a girl is planting a seed
like it’s the last spell she knows.

Somewhere,
in a flooded street,
a boy is bailing out water
with a plastic bucket
and pure belief.

Somewhere,
on a reservation,
a woman is chaining herself
to the bones of the Earth
because she remembers
what it feels like to belong
to something
older than greed.

Somewhere,
there is a spark
we have not yet ruined.

And we must protect it
with everything.

We must rise
like the oceans
we failed to listen to.
We must rage
like the wind
they tried to dam up.

Because the Earth
is not a resource.
She is our mother.
Our witness.
Our warning.

And she is not asking
for our pity,
she is demanding
our reckoning.

So let them keep their profit margins.
Let them build rockets
to escape their own consequence.

We are not leaving.

We are staying
and fighting
for the only home
that has ever loved us
enough to feed us.

This house is on fire.
And we,
we are the water.