Garden of Ash by Regina O’Melveny

I hold a small cultivator, three-pronged claw 
to dig this garden of gone, home no more.

Clad in plastic booties, mask and gloves,
I don’t know how to unearth joy.

Too much grievous rubble, scathed holidays,
fire-corroded metal, greasy grey scum

stuck to everything, even my thoughts.
We’re reduced to combustion spall and slag. 

The crud of ten thousand days, blasted.
How strange and small my daughter’s lot looks.

So too the other charred lots surrounding,
as if the firestorm shrank the city. 

As if land cringed and recoiled before fire the way
smoldering paper curls back in object terror.

Ash, ash. I stand there, claw tool in hand, heart
cauterized by shock, until finally even in disbelief,

curiosity rises, moves me to prod, rake and pull up
my grandchildren’s half-melted cups and

a tiny white pitcher plucked intact amid chunks of 
broken encrusted mugs and fused plates.

We used it sometimes for pretend, a party where
dolls and animals lined up for tea and cookies

that we slipped into our own mouths, enjoying treats
for them.  We poured milk from that innocent

porcelain pitcher, creamer really, and sipped
freshly picked peppermint tea, 

sat the monkey or bear back up
who face-planted when our happy dog wagged by.

Random salvage like our lives.
Haven’t I known this? A kind of funky grace.

My beloved family still alive, and now I see others. 
Crazy purple aster seeds have sprouted on the slope.

That’s enough salvage for the day. I put down the cultivator, 
inside-out my blue gloves as I learned during pandemic,

same with the booties, unfasten the mask and walk away
from the garden of ash, with my humble find.

3 November 2026