before memory had language

before kings carved lies into stone

the world was thawing from endless winter

rivers ran where glaciers died

then the sky changed

stars burned longer at dawn

animals ran without reason

ash fell on meltwater plains

and the warm age stopped breathing

people followed the coastlines

camps along the flooding shores

generations watching oceans climb

their maps erased every lifetime

the north wind returned without warning

green lands froze in a lifetime

forests retreated in decades

the sun felt farther away

twelve thousand nine hundred years ago

the planet inhaled cold again

ice clawed back across rivers

storms circled a silent ocean

the great currents slowed

the heat stopped traveling north

a conveyor of life broken

by waters of a dying ice sheet

fires across the continents

dust in the stratosphere

animals falling in silence

humans learning fear

we remember the long night

written in flood and bone

the age of sudden winter

the world no longer our own

we walked between two climates

children of warming and frost

history began in catastrophe

civilization born from loss

stories became warnings

warnings became gods

gods became memory

memory became myth

cities swallowed by oceans

names buried in sand

truth dissolving into legend

passed hand to hand

“the waters rose”

“the sky burned”

“the cold returned”

no empire survived the climate

no crown ruled the sky

nature rewrote the surface

without asking why

you call it myth

you call it flood

you call it punishment above

it was temperature

it was ocean

it was physics written in blood

ice receded again

and we built our world

on memories we barely understood

every calendar

every temple

every story of a fall from grace

echoes of a winter

that came too fast to face

the past was not primitive

it was interrupted

silence remembers

even when we don’t