Give Me Back My Beautiful World - Poetry by Abrar Nayeem Chowdhury.

Give Me Back My Beautiful World

    Abrar Nayeem Chowdhury

I woke to the news tapping my shoulder
like a polite stranger apologizing for the smoke.
Los Angeles was coughing into the morning,
palm trees blurred like unfinished sentences.

We have learned the language of warnings by heart now,
colors on maps, numbers climbing like impatient vines.
The ocean sends plastic postcards to every shore,
each one signed, Wish you weren’t here.

In cafés, we scroll past melting places
while our coffee cools, innocent, unburned.
The glaciers retreat quietly, not dramatically at all,
as if embarrassed to make a scene.

Somewhere, a child draws the sun green,
because that is how it looks through the window.
We correct them gently, then hesitate,
our voices uncertain, like outdated textbooks.

So I ask, not as a poet but as a neighbor,
return the mornings that smelled like rain.
Give me back my beautiful world,
and I promise to stop pretending it is indestructible.