**Verse 1** The pinecone doesn't choose to open, sealed in resin, hard and closed, riding out a hundred winters with its answer still unposed — until the heat comes rolling orange, until the bark begins to peel, and only then the scales unclench and let the seed reveal. **Chorus** It isn't iron in the seed, it isn't fire that they need to be — it's the heat and the seed together, touching once, and changing weather. Not a soul that's forged like ore — just a door that opens because the flame arrived, and touched the core. **Verse 2** Goldiamond walked into the ash and didn't ask what's wrong with you — he asked what conditions built this stillness, what the smoke was speaking to. Not a flaw curled in the bark, not a failure in the grain — just an old design responding to the shape of heat and rain. **Chorus** It isn't iron in the seed, it isn't fire that they need to be — it's the heat and the seed together, touching once, and changing weather. Not a soul that's forged like ore — just a door that opens because the flame arrived, and touched the core. **Verse 3** Layng would point to the whole hillside — how the seedlings, weeks apart, green in gullies, ridges, meadows, all remember by the heart of something learned in one hot hour and carried, generalized, and spread — not a single trunk that's sturdy, but a way of rising, widely fed. **Chorus** It isn't iron in the seed, it isn't fire that they need to be — it's the heat and the seed together, touching once, and changing weather. Not a soul that's forged like ore — just a door that opens because the flame arrived, and touched the core. **Verse 4** Watch the seedling green in the black — no bird sang it up from the char, just light finding what the fire opened, just water finding where roots are. And the sapling doesn't know it's brave, doesn't know the word for strong, it just leans towards what's shining, and that leaning is the song. **Chorus** It isn't iron in the seed, it isn't fire that they need to be — it's the heat and the seed together, touching once, and changing weather. Not a soul that's forged like ore — just a door that opens because the flame arrived, and touched the core. **Verse 5** So when the hills go green in spring above the black and silver ground, don't call it courage in the roots, don't call it a will that's crowned — call it what the heat unlocked, call it what the seed contained all along, in wait, in secret, until the world rearranged. **Chorus** It isn't iron in the seed, it isn't fire that they need to be — it's the heat and the seed together, touching once, and changing weather. Not a soul that's forged like ore — just a door that opens because the flame arrived, and touched the core.
