02/06/2026
The Midwife at the End of the World
She climbed from the low machinery of ruin,
one foot planted on the old engine of progress,
the other still searching for ground
that had not been promised, paved, poisoned,
or sold.
Behind her, the sky had forgotten its duty.
It no longer opened cleanly into morning.
It bruised, it smoked, it carried the color
of treaties broken in private rooms,
of oceans warming in their sleep,
of forests named only after they were gone.
She did not look back
because the past had become too loud—
all those factories praying through smokestacks,
all those flags snapping like teeth,
all those men in polished rooms
mistaking ownership for vision.
Before her hung the strange soft vessel
of what might still be born,
suspended from a thin branch,
fragile as mercy,
heavy as consequence.
It was not quite child,
not quite seed,
not quite future.
It swung in the contaminated wind
like a question no one in power
wanted translated.
Around her, the land had become a museum
of failed appetites:
a helmet half-buried in dust,
a wheel without destination,
bones of tools, bones of laws,
bones of promises
made to the hungry by the well-fed.
Somewhere, rivers carried mercury
through the silver mouths of fish.
Somewhere, cities rehearsed their own drowning.
Somewhere, children learned
that the weather now had a temper,
that rain could arrive like accusation,
that fire could choose a neighborhood
and remember every roof.
Still, she stood there—
not saint, not savior,
but witness.
Her covered head gleamed
like an unfinished mask,
as if identity itself
had become too dangerous
to wear openly.
Her body was not offering beauty
to the ruined world;
it was indicting it.
Flesh still lived here.
Breath still lived here.
The old animal warmth
still argued against extinction.
And the hanging vessel trembled.
Inside it, perhaps,
was the next species of tenderness.
Perhaps a last idea.
Perhaps only another hunger
waiting to be named civilization.
She reached no hand toward it.
She knew birth was not innocence.
She knew creation without conscience
was only another form of conquest.
So she waited
in the brown weather,
among the abandoned machines,
among the shadows of animals
we had turned into myth
because we could not bear
their disappearance.
She waited for us
to become worthy
of what we kept demanding
from the future.
And above the wasteland,
the unborn thing swayed—
a lantern,
a warning,
a lung of pale skin
breathing for a world
that had nearly forgotten how.
R&R26