Four billion years, and here you are, weeping over a dry bird.
We do not fully understand the weeping. The bird is cooked. The bird is enormous. The bird sits in a pool of its own fat on a platter you did not have to run down, corner, or outlast, and you are apologizing for it. The lungfish gulped mud for a living.
The shrew ate what the big ones left. The woman who kept the fire through the long dark counted her people by whether their ribs still showed. And you, our heir, our torch, are saying sorry that the meat is a touch firm.
We are not complaining. Look at this table. Look what the hands built. The same hands that pulled thorns and knapped flint are now cracking a small nut with a device made only for cracking small nuts. There is a bowl of orange globes no one intends to eat. There is bread, then more bread, then a separate bread that is somehow dessert.
The man who buried the seed corn and went to bed hungry so spring would have something to plant, he never once imagined a plate scraped half-full into the bin. And we find we are not angry. We are staggered. You have so much you can afford to be careless.
We spent everything so that you could.
Now the room goes loud, someone laughs too hard at nothing, a child is put to bed and carried, actually carried, warm and safe and not once eyed by anything in the dark.
We go quiet. We watch you fall asleep in a chair with your belt undone.
Rest, runner.
We ran so you could.