L.A. Strong- The Fire Aid concert and my "After the Fire" poem

The Red Hot Chili Peppers singing "Under the Bridge," a very personal song written by Anthony Keidis, about his home, the City of Angels, Los Angeles, California.  Fire Aid benefit concert, January 30, 2025.  The concert was a benefit for all the thousands of people affected by the terrible Pacific Palisades and Alta Dena fires of January 2025.  

Thank you firefighters!  

I watched them save the area I live in now, on the ground and in the air.  Thank you for your hard work.

Fire Aid LA full concert (six hours long) 

Here are some of the ROCK highlights from the Fire Aid L.A. concert (These song/set videos are getting taken down or seriously shadow banned, but I'll link the best ones I can find now)

Nirvana Reunion- 4 songs- Surviving Nirvana members plus singers St. Vincent, Kim Gordon, Joan Jett, and Violet Grohl

Red Hot Chili Peppers- "Californication"

Red Hot Chili Peppers- full set

Chris and Rich Robinson (Black Crowes) with Slash- Led Zepplin's "Going to California"

Stevie Nicks full set

P!nk sings Led Zepplin (cell phone video/poor quality)

No Doubt- Full set

No Doubt- "Don't Speak" 

Green Day- three song set featuring Billie Eilish

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

(aka Steve Emig)

I'm doing most of my writing these days on Substack, you can check out more of my work there:

Steve Emig The White Bear Substack