You Have Words

The bird has feathers.
The river has water.
The hurricane has wind.
You have words.

The bird does not argue
with the sky.
Feathers grow because flying
is written into its bones.
Light gathers beneath its wings
like a remembered promise,
and when it lifts,
the air makes space for it
without resistance.

No manifesto.
No explanation.
Just motion answering instinct.

I watch it from the ground,
from this body that walks instead of glides,
and I wonder
why my own inheritance
feels heavier to carry.

The river does not hoard its water.
It accepts the long instruction
of gravity,
the patient pull toward somewhere else.
Every drop knows it will not remain
what it was upstream.

Stones learn its language
by being worn smooth.
Banks learn surrender.
The river does not ask
if it is allowed to change shape—
it changes,
and the world adjusts.

When it floods,
we call it disaster.
When it dries,
we call it loss.
But the river calls it
breathing.

The hurricane is born far from intention.
Warm water, rising air,
a whisper that becomes a spiral.
It does not hate the coastline.
It does not plan destruction.
It only obeys
the physics of excess—
what happens
when energy has nowhere left to go.

We name it monster,
give it a human face,
as if the storm were angry like us,
as if it carried grudges,
as if wind could remember insults.

But the hurricane is honest.
It does not pretend to be gentle.
It arrives whole.

And then there is you.

No feathers stitched to your arms,
no endless current carrying you forward,
no roar that announces your arrival
days in advance.

You are given words.

Small, at first.
Milk-soft syllables.
Names for hunger.
Sounds that reach outward
before they know what they touch.

You learn quickly
that words can open doors
or close them forever.
That a sentence can shelter
or expose.
That silence can bruise
as deeply as shouting.

You learn that words cost.

They cost breath.
They cost misunderstanding.
They cost the risk
of being seen
where you hoped to remain invisible.

So you ration them.
You weigh them.
You hide them behind politeness,
behind irony,
behind the careful architecture
of almost saying.

Inside you,
there is a whole weather system
held back by etiquette.

Some days
you feel like the bird,
your thoughts lifting easily,
phrases landing exactly
where you intended.

Other days
you are the river in drought,
language reduced to a trickle,
every word feeling precious,
heavy with consequence.

And some nights—
the nights when sleep refuses
to negotiate—
you feel the hurricane assembling.
Memory heating.
Regret rising.
Old conversations replaying
with improved answers
that arrive too late.

You lie still,
trying to keep the storm offshore,
afraid of what it might damage
if it makes landfall.

No one teaches you
how to live with this inheritance.
School teaches grammar,
not courage.
Vocabulary,
not timing.
How to persuade,
but not how to confess.

You learn by watching others fail.
You learn by failing louder.

There are words you never say
because they would rearrange the room.
Words that would tilt a relationship
off its careful balance.
Words that would require
a different future.

So you store them.
You tell yourself
you will use them later,
when the moment is right,
when you are braver,
when the cost feels lower.

But words do not age like wine.
They ferment.
They build pressure.

The bird does not wait
for permission to migrate.
The river does not postpone
the sea.
The hurricane does not pause
to ask if the coast is ready.

And you—
you sit with a mouth full of weather,
wondering why your chest feels crowded.

One day,
perhaps by accident,
a word escapes.
Not the perfect one.
Not the rehearsed one.
Just an honest one,
rough around the edges.

And something shifts.

The world does not end.
The room remains standing.
The sky does not fall
because you named what was true.

You realize then
that words are not fragile things.
They are elements.
They reshape landscapes over time.
They carve canyons in memory.
They leave sediment.

A single sentence
can become a shoreline
someone else builds a life against.

You begin to see
how small you are,
and how powerful.

How your voice
is a local phenomenon
and a cosmic one.

Somewhere,
light that left a star
before language existed
is still traveling.
Still moving toward eyes
that might never look up.

Somewhere,
hydrogen is learning to become helium,
pressure teaching matter
how to glow.

And here you are,
on this thin crust of a planet,
with a mouth capable of shaping air
into meaning.

The universe does not require
your commentary.
It will expand without your metaphors.
It will collapse stars
whether or not you write poems about them.

But you are not here
to be necessary.

You are here
to participate.

To add your particular frequency
to the ongoing hum.
To speak from the exact coordinates
of your experience—
no one else can stand there for you.

The bird has feathers
because flight needs structure.
The river has water
because movement needs substance.
The hurricane has wind
because power needs release.

You have words
because consciousness needs echo.

Use them imperfectly.
Use them before certainty arrives.
Use them to say
I am afraid,
I am grateful,
I was wrong,
I love you,
I am still learning.

Let them be small
when small is honest.
Let them be loud
when silence would lie.

One day,
your words will outlive your breath.
They will drift into other minds,
change direction,
pick up meanings you never intended.

You will not control that.
The river does not control the sea.

All you can do
is speak with care,
with attention,
with the humility of someone
borrowing air from the planet
for a moment.

The bird flies.
The river moves.
The hurricane clears space.

And you—
you name things into being,
again and again,
until the cosmos recognizes itself
in your voice.