After the Burn

The forest remembers its fire in the blackened spines of trees, each char-mark a letter in a language of survival.

Green breaks through ash like whispered resistance, patient and small—seedlings that taste smoke in the soil and still reach upward.

I watch the land rewrite itself, learning that beauty and damage are the same wound seen from different angles.

Nothing returns unchanged. The fire took the old names, and new growth speaks them differently, vowels shifted by time.

This is what survival looks like: not forgetting the burning, but becoming the forest that grows from it— scarred, stronger, unrecognizable to itself.