29/07/2026
For the Ones We’re Losing
Tonight there’s a full moon. And I’m not just looking up at it. I’m looking down. Around. At what’s burning. At what’s drowning.
This isn’t weather. This isn’t bad luck. This is us. Our extraction, our excess, our refusal to stop in time.
We lit this fire long before the mountains did.
So tonight, I grieve. And I own it.
I grieve the pine martens who didn’t get a warning. The tortoises, slow, built that way for a reason, and slow wasn’t enough this time. The cicadas stopped mid-song. The wild boar, the deer, running from fire into more fire. The hedgehogs curled up small, the way they’ve always survived things. Not this. The owls who lost the trees that told them where home was. The salamanders in the ash where a stream used to be.
I grieve the seagrass meadows called Posidonia, down in the Mediterranean, older than some of our oldest stories, going thin, going pale, going quiet as the sea is too warm. The coral turning to bone. The fish trying to swim north but there is no way out. The turtles confusing plastic bags for jellyfish. The seahorses, the octopus, the sardines, the whole small silver economy of the sea, thinning out. The dolphins going hungry because the fish they follow are already gone from overfishing.
I grieve the bees confused by blossoms that came too early. The storks who don’t know what season it is anymore. Neither do I, some days. The butterflies who timed their whole lives to a spring that doesn’t show up when it used to. The nightingales who used to sing here and don’t anymore.
I grieve the old olive trees, some of them a thousand years old, burning in a single afternoon. The cork oaks. The almond groves. The soil itself — the worms, the fungi, the whole quiet underground world that made anything grow at all.
Somebody has to say their names. Even the ones we don’t have names for.
Grief is just love with nowhere to go. So let it go somewhere. Let it go here.
Rest, small ones. You mattered more than the headlines said.
And we’re so sorry. We’re trying. We have to try harder.
Artwork detail by Meagan Donegan
