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