Mushroom

Mushroom.

I watch it rise, this god we made from mathematics and metal, from equations that sang too sweetly on blackboards in hidden rooms— how we loved our terrible arithmetic.

The stem ascends like a prophet’s finger pointing to heaven we’ve just erased, while the cap blooms outward, a jellyfish of fire swimming through an ocean of sky.

I am become death, someone said, but I am become witness: to shadows burned into walls, to birds falling mid-flight like stones, to silence that follows thunder when thunder swallows the world.

This is our harvest— not the small umbrellas after rain that fed us through famines, but this towering column of light that feeds on cities, on centuries, on children’s unfinished songs.

Watch how it spreads its spores: fear in the bone marrow, half-lives in the groundwater, a new alphabet of isotopes teaching the earth to glow in all the wrong ways.

I stand here, narrator of aftermath, knowing that some clouds never bring rain, only the long winter where nothing grows but our spectacular regret.