Let Beauty Persist, Even When the World Burns

Let beauty persist,
even when the world burns—
not as denial,
but as the last act of truth.

When the skyline is licked
by flames of fury and forgetting,
and sirens replace songbirds,
when ash settles like gray snow
on the shoulders of the living—
let a child still draw a sun
in the dust on a broken windowpane.

Let her not ask if it is foolish
to dream of colors
when color is drowned
by black smoke and red warnings.

Let her draw, still.
Let her dream, still.
Let her love the idea of sun
even if the real one
is obscured by the collapse.


For what is beauty
if not defiance with grace?
It is not soft.
It is not weak.
It is not a garland
laid gently upon peace.
Beauty is the green leaf
growing from a bullet-shattered branch.
It is the poem
written beside a corpse,
the kiss whispered
through a gas mask.


And yes—
the world does burn.
It burns with the fire
of cities collapsing under greed,
oceans rising in silent rebellion,
truth being auctioned
to the highest bidder.

It burns with the wildfires
of hatred made policy,
with the embers of indifference
smoldering in screens
that numb us to real pain
and real people.

It burns when justice
becomes a myth
and memory, a target.

It burns
when we forget the names
of those who died last week
because the ones who die today
have already replaced them
in our attention spans.

It burns with irony
and sorrow and apathy
and the long, slow horror
of a future we saw coming
and still did nothing to stop.


But still—
let beauty persist.

Let the violinist in the rubble
tune her last string
before the roof caves in.

Let the baker
make bread for a neighbor
who may never return.

Let the old man in exile
recite verses
his grandfather taught him
even as his accent
is outlawed.

Let beauty be ungovernable
in a world
obsessed with control.


You may ask:
what good is beauty
when everything else is lost?
Isn’t it indulgence?
Isn’t it a distraction?

But you miss the point.
Beauty is not the escape.
It is the resistance.

It is the art
painted on prison walls.
The seeds buried
in bombed-out gardens.
The stories told
when silence would be safer.

Beauty is
the one thing they cannot weaponize
or patent or confine.

It belongs to the soul
like breath to the body—
even if broken,
it still moves.


Yes, on the other side,
there is coldness.
There is the outcome of surrender—
not the brave surrender of grief
but the passive kind
that lets horror become routine.

Without beauty,
we become efficient
in our forgetting.

We learn how to live
without wonder.
We become excellent
at surviving
and terrible
at being alive.

We scroll through tragedies
and click away from them
before they ruin our lunch.

We call this modernity.
We call this coping.

But it is decay
with a good internet connection.


And so—
let beauty persist.

Let it rise like weeds
in places where marble statues
of dictators once stood.

Let it grow wild
in border zones,
and refugee camps,
and in the dreams
of the ones we call collateral.

Let it persist
in the mother
who still braids her daughter’s hair
even when they have nowhere to go.
Let it persist
in the couple who still dance
in a subway station
even while the bombs fall.

Let it persist
in the last seeds saved
in jars on Arctic shelves,
ready to outlive us all.


Let beauty persist
even when the world burns—
not because it saves us,
but because it reminds us
what was once worth saving.

And if the world rebuilds,
let it not be with bricks alone
but with poems carved
into the new walls,
with gardens planted
in the ruins,
with music woven
into the code
of our new machines.

Let it persist
not as decoration
but as direction.


And if we are gone—
if our words are dust
and our cities swallowed
by the very fires we fed—
let some wandering wind
find what beauty we left behind.

Let it carry
our fragments of light
into the next world.

So that maybe,
just maybe,
someone will know
we tried.
That we dared to sing
even when the sky
fell around us.
That we let beauty persist,
not because it was easy,
but because
it was the only thing
that made life worth it.

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