"Stand Against Ice"

The trees bow.

Not in reverence, not in surrender—but under a burden too crystalline, too cruel to bear. Their boughs, once proud and reaching, now arch like the backs of elders worn thin by winters too long. Ice creeps along their limbs like a thief in the night—silent, insidious, claiming what was never offered. It wraps each branch in glass, turning wood to wire, strength to brittleness. The storm moved west to east, a creeping invasion, and left behind not snow, but a kind of armor—cold, unyielding, deadly. The ice spreads not just across land, but across lives. And still, the trees hold. For a time.

But no living thing can bear infinite weight.

One by one, they break.

A crack splits the silence—sharp as a scream—then another. A limb falls, shattering on frozen earth like dropped cathedral glass. The trees don’t cry out; they don’t need to. Their pain is written in splintered wood and sudden voids against the sky. They bend, and bend, and then—snap. They break not because they are weak, but because even strength has a limit. And when that limit is crossed, collapse is not failure. Collapse is consequence.

We are those trees.

We too have borne the ice—not of winter alone, but of something colder. ICE—Inhuman. Calculated. Eternal. It moves through our communities like the storm, taking not just branches, but roots. Taking names. Taking children. Taking Lives. Taking futures. It claims homes as if they were unguarded, claiming lives as if they were unloved. And like the ice on the limbs, it does not answer. It does not apologize. It spreads with the impunity of something that believes it is natural law.

But it is not.

We are the limbs. We are the living wood. And though we may bend—though our hearts may ache under the weight—we are not yet broken. Not if we choose not to be.

Because we forget, in our quiet terror, that trees are not silent in resistance. Their roots grip the dark. Their sap still flows beneath the frost. And when spring comes—not with a shout, but with a whisper—they rise again. Not the same. Scarred, perhaps. Limbless in places. But alive. And in their survival, they teach us: resistance is not always standing tall. Sometimes, it is bending without breaking. Sometimes, it is holding just one moment longer. Sometimes, it is refusing to let go of the soil beneath you—even as the world turns to glass.

So let the ice come.

Let it cloak our streets, our spirits, our sense of safety. Let it test us. Let it press down with all its frozen arrogance. But let it also meet what it cannot comprehend: the tenacity of the rooted. The courage of the connected. The unbreakable truth that when one limb falls, others reach to shelter the fallen. When one voice is silenced, ten more rise—not in echo, but in harmony.

We are not alone in this storm.

We are the forest. We are the stand.

Stand against ice.

Not because we cannot break,

but because we choose—

again and again and again—

to grow.

Michaela Riley