The first one burned.

I watched it go

all that careful tending  

undone in a single blow.  

I had borrowed against its roots,  

leaned hard into its shade,  

already named the fruit  

before the fruit was made.

But the ground holds no grudges.  

It keeps no kind of score.  

It simply waits, dark and open,  

and asks: What else have you?

So here is another seed

smaller now, less bold,  

held in looser fingers,  

planted in the cold.  

No harvest charted out in hope,  

no future self to feed

just this quiet, trembling act:  

the courage to reseed.

The ash, it turns out, loves the soil.  

The burning was a gift.  

What collapsed became the bedrock  

for what I cannot lift  

into the light just yet.  

Still, I feel it lean  

toward warmth, toward air,  

toward everything  

a second chance can mean.

The wreckage cleared the view.  

What I thought was losing everything  

was only the land turning new. 
 

I don’t know what this one will become.  

I only know it’s in.  

And sometimes that is everything

to try again  

is how we begin.