TULIPS NO 3

I see the petals, vibrant and full, layered in a dance of color. A world once teeming with possibility. In No. 1, the hues are loud, bold, hopeful—youthful hands reaching towards the sun, believing in the promise of fairness, of justice, of truth. They do not yet know how the roots beneath them twist, how the soil is poisoned with the deception of power.

No. 2 begins the shift. The colors cool, dim, tangled in uncertainty. The petals no longer hold their symmetry; they bend, they hesitate. The air is thick with voices that rewrite history, that dismiss science, that strip humanity of its shared thread. Laws, once pillars, are dismissed as illusions. The young look on, bewildered—who do they trust? What is real?

By No. 3, the bloom has dulled. The world has grown heavy with denial, with sovereign citizens untethered from consequence, with leaders who shape the truth to fit their will. The petals remain, but their brilliance is gone, fading into muted echoes of what could have been.

We were meant to grow together. But now, we fracture. And the young are left to gather the petals.