Meteor Generation

If I were the weatherperson

And I was asked to name the sky

To predict an outcome

To fathom a trend

To make something easy

From something so vast

Crucial to our world’s outcome

And yet so close by

If I were the weatherperson

And I was asked to name the sky

Would I categorize it by only its storms, winds, and rains?

Not even glancing upwards

Before I walk out the door

Armed with an umbrella

And the assumption that it will have only lightning to throw at me?

This expectation backed up by the fact

That sometimes

Inevitably

It storms?

If I were the weatherperson

And I was asked to name the sky

Would I praise it for endless clarity, perpetual sunshine?

Turning my back

On the clouds forming on the horizon

Closing my eyes

To the flaws fast approaching

That could be amended

But instead go untreated

While I peer through sun-tinted lenses

Proclaiming “Another beautiful day, folks,”

Seconds before

My weather station

Is torn up by a hurricane?

But I am not the weatherperson

I have yet to even plant my feet

The sky is my present

I see it as I fly past

Falling

Alongside the millions of others

Defined by this space and this time

From the weatherperson’s perspective

For all those on the ground

The sky is the future

From which the next generations will fall

Ready to inherit the Earth

Ready to paint the world’s canvas

Into a picture no one yet knows

The cynics judge us to be acid rain

But what they sense is a bitterness that is all their own

The praisers imagine we are special snowflakes

But we won’t melt on the pavement of real life

No, we are meteors

Our descent is fast and furious

Righteous and real

We were born equipped with

Technology

Media

And eyes

To glimpse our destination

Long before we will ever reach it

We can already hear the pleas of nature

As pollution slowly consumes it

See the smoke of violence

At the hands of our predecessors

It won’t extinguish our path

Nor slow us down

It just ignites us further

As we hurtle through space

What will we do once we land?

In those fleeting moments the Earth is ours,

Will we destroy something?

Build something?

Heal the wounds, or deepen the scars?

Come together, or drift apart?

We have fire in us

After all

Fire seeking change

It is up to us to direct it

To save it for

The walls that divide us

The chains that shackle us

The values that corrupt us

Even this fury, this hunger for justice

Must be selective

Constructive

Controlled

Lest the whole world burn to ashes

At the first wave of our meteor shower

Artwork: "Fanfare" by Fran Kenney