Gopu M. Sunil
The Only Language That It Still Speaks
We kept the thermostat set to ‘forever’,
as if the planet were a room we could heat
without paying the bill.
We filled the sky with our invisible footprints—
a slow snowfall of carbon
settling into every breath.
The ocean, patient as a monk,
began to rise
not in a dramatic rush,
but in a quiet, relentless inching
that stole the shore
one silent morning at a time.
The forests stopped whispering.
They began to creak,
to cough,
to turn their green into ash
like old paper in a fire.
We called it growth—
a word that sounded like a promise.
But promises don’t come with deadlines.
Now the storms arrive
with the weight of a warning,
and the air tastes like metal
after a summer that never ends.
We have overshot the limit
we didn’t know we had,
and the world is reminding us
in the only language it still speaks:
weather.