It's Still Life

Liturgy for the Paddle Wheel — where old and new collide

I. The Animal of Iron and Breath
It came up the Rhône like a great beast learning to speak.
Pistons for lungs, smoke for voice,
paddle wheels striking the water
with the rhythm of a heart that never tires.

We stood on the bank and watched it approach,
this creature of riveted plates and furious motion,
and felt something in us recognise it.
Not as machine, which is was, but as herald.

The old world was dying on its feet,
and this …this iron thing
was what would bury it.

II. The Shouldering of Rivers
It did not ask the Rhône for passage.
It demanded.
The paddle wheels bit into the current,
each strike a small violence,
each forward thrust a declaration:
I am here. I will not wait. I will not yield.

The river, which had flowed for millennia,
answering only to moon and gravity,
found itself obeying orders,
shouldered into submission
by a thing that had not existed
a generation ago.

Brigid watches and thinks:
This is how gods die.
Not with thunder.
With steam.

III. The Language We Must Learn
If this is how the modern age intends to go,
burning forward while pretending nothing is lost,
smoke smudging the sky like an unanswered question,
pistons hammering out the rhythm of
faster,
faster,
always faster,
then we must learn its language
before it decides to speak for us.

Not to love it.
Not to fight it.
But to understand it.
To find the words that live inside the noise.
To translate the future
into something we can carry
without being consumed.

IV. The Fear That Rides the Smoke
There is fear in this, and it is felt.
Brigid in the set of her shoulders,
Felreil in the twitch of his coattail.

Fear that the old ways will be forgotten.
Fear that new tongues have no word for enough.
Fear that the beast of iron and steam
will not stop at the river,
will not stop at the city,
will not stop until what was slow and careful
has been burned to fuel.

And beneath the fear, something else:
the terrible, thrilling knowledge
that they are alive at the turning,
that they will be the ones
who remember what the world was
before it learned to speak in pistons.

V. The Wisdom of Witness
Brigid reaches for Felreil’s sleeve—
a small gesture, almost nothing—
and says what they both know:

The future does not ask permission.
It arrives.
It shoulders its way up the river
and expects us to make room.

But we are not the river.
We are the ones who watch
and remember
and decide, in the end,
what of our old world
deserves to ride the new one.

VI. For the Turning Age
See the paddle wheel and its iron hunger.
See the smoke that writes questions on the sky.
Feel the fear that keeps us honest
and the hope that keeps us brave.

Remember the old world, dying as it must,
and the new world, arriving as it will.

And bless travellers at the edge,
who see the future coming
and do not turn away.

Learn its language.
Remember your own.
And when the beast speaks,
be ready to answer

we translators
of everything the steam
cannot say.