The Oracle's Burden
To see the future clearly, and to be believed by no one
The god gave me sight, and then, laughing, he took away the gift of being believed.
I see the future the way you see the room around you: plainly, and without escape.
When I speak, the words are true, yet they fall from my mouth like stones no hand will catch.
I told the city that its walls would burn, and they crowned me a madwoman.
I told a mother that her son would not return, and she turned her face away.
To know without power to change is the cruellest shape a gift has ever taken.
Men imagine that is a kind of , a seat beside the thrones of kings.
They do not know it is a room without doors, where every wall is made of tomorrow.
I have watched children play in a square that I already saw drowned in ash.
I have smiled at weddings whose grooms I had witnessed, in , lowered into the ground.
Silence would be a mercy, but the words rise in me like water finding its level.
So I speak, and I am mocked, and the future arrives exactly as I described it.
Afterward, in the ruins, no one remembers that the mad girl had named the hour.
They remember only that the gods were angry, and that no one could have foreseen it.
I could have. I did. But foreseeing and being heard are two different countries.
The god who cursed me understood this: truth without trust is a lamp inside a box.
It burns, and it gives its light to no one, and it consumes the air that feeds it.
I have stopped hoping that a single soul will look at me and simply nod.
Yet I have not stopped speaking, and I have wondered, often, why that should be so.
Perhaps the truth wishes to be spoken even where it will not be received.
Perhaps a , , is still worth more than a silence freely chosen.
I am the woman at the gate whom the histories will call and unwell.
But long after the clever men are dust, my words will match what actually occurred.
That is the strange, cold the god forgot to strip away when he cursed me.
Believe me or do not; the future does not your belief before it comes.
And when it comes, remember that a voice once named it, and ask yourself why you laughed.