What if we’re the rumor planet,

the one they point to on star maps and say,

“There. That’s the wild one.”

What if the spiral-armed cities glow above us

like campfires on a canyon rim,

and we are the smoke they watch

curl up from our blue-green bowl of trees?

What if we’re the uncontacted tribe,

mud on our feet, plastic in our rivers,

arguing over where the sun goes at night

while telescopes squint like one open eye?

Up there, in languages made of radio murmurs

and aurora-colored signs,

do they pass around grainy images of our world

like anthropologists with contraband photos?

Do they whisper to their children,

“See that tiny light?

That’s Earth.

You can’t visit yet.

They’re still learning not to burn down their own house

to see what’s inside the matches.”

Maybe somewhere,

on a long, slow ship of silver bone and starlight,

a historian of impossible patience

is writing a thesis on us:

Phase I: Worship the sky.

Phase II: Try to own it.

Phase III: Realize it owns you.

Maybe there’s a galactic group chat

where our name pops up once a century:

EARTH UPDATE?

Still fighting over imaginary lines.

But they wrote a symphony that hurts in a good way.

One of them died saving a stranger.

A few are planting forests where the ghosts of forests stand.

They’ve begun sending poems into the dark again.

Recommendation: No contact. Watch closely.

Perhaps they circle our orbit in invisible boats,

hovering just beyond the edge of what we can believe,

listening to our static and songs,

our weather reports and late-night confessions,

holding back like kind gods or careful neighbors

because they remember when they were small and frightened too.

What if the whole Galaxy knows we’re here

and has signed some unwritten treaty of restraint:

Do not touch the experiment.

Do not answer their first screams.

Wait for their first questions.