Paradigms

Your sister Terra

loved the clouds.

Not the cliché of bestial shapes

we think we see.

Each one's there to shield.

Not to occlude the sun

and flare of stars.

But for those who

orbit the earth.

When she was 10, she vowed

she'd be a floating Cosmonaut—

Astronaut,

your mother promptly scolded.

But the cosmos denoted distance,

an escape to foreverland—

blast the Russo-Commies.

They haven’t got a patent on

creation.

The crew on the ISS

post their panoramic

views. TikTok’s good for

something. The Earth is not a

marble

it’s the shift of

stain & speckle—the whiter 

the better—

its malignant

hide-and-seek.

They’ll boast our

planet’s picturesque. Its plume &

tuft of cirrus, concealing

urbanity’s squall.

Never the same sky twice.

And out-of-sight, pogroms of

never again.

Buckshot in the flesh.

A forest raped by flame.

And just beyond it all,

a cottage in the Alps;

the embodiment of calm.

What we call peace 

is playing deaf.

The still before the

surge of tsunamic snow.

A daughter’s gasp & shrill—

please papa don't—

bouncing off a panda

in the sky, its claw that

bears down slowly

on a fish—no guts,

no blood, just something you’d say

is minding its goddamn

business.

Andreas Gripp

February 8, 2026

RF Photo