Blazing Now and Never

He once rode his father’s shoulders like a satellite dish scanning the stars, both learning the terrain, one through soil and instinct, the other through wonder’s altitude.

But the hills are gone now, replaced by firewalls and drone paths. The boy, now a man, stands atop a glass tower where the skyline flickers like a warning light on a warhead’s shell.

Below, the streets pulse with algorithmic obedience. Tradition’s footholds erased by boots marching to the rhythm of autocrats scripting history like malware in the bloodstream of nations.

Wisdom, once a compass carved from bark and bone, is now a glitch in the feed, ignored like a whisper in a room full of megaphones.  Success is measured in conquest, not consequence, in flags planted on ash and treaties signed in smoke.

He lowers the telescope, sees snow swirling like lost data refusing to download. Each gust a ghost of fathers who believed truth could not be redacted, that integrity had weight.

But now, the wind carries propaganda like pollen, seeding minds with fear, growing forests of silence where dissent once bloomed.

Still, beneath the frostbitten glass, a boy waits, another shoulder ride, another chance to see beyond the blaze and remember what peace once looked like before it was pixelated into war.