The Awakening

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**The Awakening**

They thought the Earth was sleeping.

They carved their names into her forests
with teeth of iron,
fed her rivers to machines that do not dream,
taught the sky to wear a cough.

They believed silence was surrender.

They believed the oceans were only water,
not memory.
Not witness.
Not the oldest eye.

But listen.

The mountains have begun to shift
in their stone thrones.

The wind no longer wanders.
It prowls.

The sea pulls its breath inward,
not in fear,
but in decision.

You who poisoned the air
with your careless hunger,
did you think the lungs of the world
would not learn your name?

You who broke the backs of the gentle,
did you think pain
was a language spoken only downward?

No.

Pain speaks upward.
Pain speaks outward.
Pain speaks until even gods must answer.

And they are answering now.

Not as bearded kings in distant clouds,
but as wildfire remembering its ancient path,
as ice releasing its long-held warning,
as storm standing up
on its thousand legs.

The gods were never gone.

They were waiting
in root and wave,
in feather and flame,
in the human heart
just before it says
enough.

Now the guilty feel it
in their sleep.

A tremor.

A crack.

A whisper moving through the bones of the world:

Build with love,
or be buried
in the ruins of your own forgetting.
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Rap, Gutter Drill, Sludgey 808s, Dirty 808s, Grimy Trap, Dark Trap, Underground Hip-Hop, Aggressive Rap!, female