Ashes And Ascent

Angelenos

Smoke twists like forgotten dreams
caught in the ribs of a gutted skyline,
the bones of yesterday aching in the light.


But from the blackened ground,
a seed stirs—a quiet defiance.
Not all stories end in cinders;
some begin there.


The air hums with a new kind of music,
a beat stitched together
by hands that refuse to stop building,
by voices that crackle but do not break.


Where fire ran,
there is now a pulse,
a heartbeat louder than ruin.
Steel will rise where it once melted,
and shadows, no longer feared,
become merely the space
where light has yet to bloom.


The city,
like its people,
finds its power
not in what it lost,
but in what it dares to imagine.


This is how we are.
Not survivors,
but sculptors of what remains.