The Ruin in Your Mind

The Ruin in Your Mind

          after Season: A Letter to the Future (Scavengers Studio)

Impossible Stranger,

There is a season for every time we’ve ever known. Even more for every time we haven’t. There was a season of love, gold and dulcet. A season of tides and turning. Of water and war stalking our prismatic lands. Of sleep dreamless and time unraveled. A season of withering grain silos & droplets plinking into a pot. A season of birds making nests of our unread letters. A season, even, of cows, their mooing and their cream and the gentle clinging of their bells, of goats and their grass chomping, of crickets and their stridulations calming the fields of our dead. This season of now, of haunting, of memories precious as jewels – I leave it behind. A season comes, soon, of forgetting, history slipping from our shoulders, and I refuse it. All I love will soon be an echo, and then? Not even that. Who are we if we cannot recall what we’ve lost? Who are you, fashioning a name from a name someone died loving you with? I have loved too much for the future to never know it. I have lost too dearly for only the ground to cry out with my past. For my sake: remember. The seasons of terrible artist kings. The seasons of floods and kites, of horns and horns and bellowing shores. The seasons of states and symbols and lights we cannot remember the purpose of, shining beyond our knowing. The season we believed a better world could be built if only we took the chance to begin.

Note

Season: A Letter to the Future is a 2023 adventure following a young woman from a small village documenting the world as it comes to an end. Part of this poem’s inspiration comes from Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On.