Seeds Of Smoke Poem by linus gerald

They said the sky was fine—
just a trick of the light,
just a season's sigh.
They said the heat was rumor,
the drought a passing mood
of a moody earth.

They whispered through glowing screens,
stitched certainty from fragments,
wrapped doubt in the costume of truth.
A thousand voices echoed one refrain:
Nothing is wrong. Nothing is urgent.

And so the rivers thinned quietly.

Disinformation is not a storm—
it is a slow salt
poured into soil.
It does not shout;
it settles.
It clouds the farmer's forecast,
blurs the scientist's warning,
turns neighbors into skeptics
of their own fields.

The glaciers speak in meltwater.
The oceans rise in patient syllables.
But falsehood, bright and viral,
travels faster than the tide.

When lies take root,
they bloom in parliaments and markets,
stall clean energy at the gate,
delay the seeds of adaptation,
mock the hands that measure warming air.

Meanwhile, maize curls in the heat.
Rice bows to salt.
Cattle search for vanished pasture.
And the granaries of tomorrow
are mortgaged to confusion.

What is a harvest
without trust in the season?
What is a policy
without trust in the data?

Disinformation starves more than minds.
It withholds irrigation from action,
fertilizes apathy,
poisons the well of collective will.

In the fog of half-truths,
we argue about thermometers
while forests burn.
We debate definitions of drought
as children count empty plates.

Truth is slower.
It walks with evidence in hand,
scarred by peer review,
patient as a seed beneath frost.
But it must be tended—
watered with literacy,
shielded by transparency,
harvested in shared responsibility.

For climate is not partisan.
Hunger has no ideology.
And the atmosphere does not scroll—
it accumulates.

Let us clear the fields of rumor,
pull up weeds of doubt by their roots.
Let us plant discernment,
teach our children to read the weather
and the words about it.

Because the future is not only warmed
by carbon—
it is warped
by what we choose to believe.