A poet for most of my life, I wrote this poem while the fires were still burning. This is a rewrite of a poem I wrote while working with the Red Cross on the huge Rodeo Chedeski fires in Arizona in 2002. I lost that original poem.
After the fire
I thought it was a nightmare
When I awoke
It couldn’t be real
Some kind of tragic joke
But there I stood
Amid the char
The house, my life
Even my car
The grass crunched black
Beneath my shoes
I had my family
But no idea what to do
Lost… the house, furniture
Our pictures and things
We had each other, the kids
And our wedding rings
Everything got blurry
I could still smell the smoke
With a charred 9 iron
I began to poke
I hoped for something
Some item dear
To have survived the inferno
A small reason to cheer
Soot, ashes, charred pieces of wood
Shattered picture frames
I wanted not to cry, I wanted hope
I wanted someone to blame
Our home, now ruins
It just couldn’t be real
I found nothing to pick up
I didn’t know how to feel
The skeletons of trees
In our backyard
Black, crisp, and silent
Everything was charred
I rubbed my eyes
I screamed loud at God
Why did this happen?
It was all just too hard
That’s when I saw it
A single green blade of grass
A shoot of life among the black
The future surging from the past
I walked closer
By the sliver of green, I froze
Against the forces of hell
That blade of grass rose
It couldn’t shout or scream
That shoot simply grew
If that blade of grass could start over
I realized we could come back, too
It was tough, the weeks after
We began anew, step by step
The memory of that blade of grass
I clung to and kept
Each day a bit of progress
To replace the life we had lost
Little things meant much more now
We struggled, but it was worth the cost
Each new day we woke up
Then we figured out what to do
If that single, green blade of grass could grow back
We knew that we could, too
-The White Bear
