Healing Soup for Those Who Lost Their Homes in the Fire

Greet the giant redwood trees still standing,

Drop to your knees in thanks

That you still have a house to call home.

Let your tears moisten the dry, thirsty soil.

Water the garden for the first time since evacuation,

Making sure to wash the ashes off the vegetables.

If only you could sift the good ashes from the bad,

The burnt forest that will nourish its own ground

From the burnt tires and incinerated crockware,

Exploded propane tanks and pulverized fiberglass.

Nothing is safe. Not your lungs, not the soil,

Not the watershed, nor these vegetables.

But don’t discard them.

Take the poisons as a homeopathic:

A little bit will make your body stronger.

Bring in the harvest, squash and greens,

Onions and fragrant herbs.

Thank the chickens for sacrificing their life for yours,

Wash the pieces of cold flesh and place them in the big pot.

Fill with filtered water. Turn on the blue flames,

Nice and contained inside their metal burners.

Add stalks of celery, a piece of onion attached at the root,

Cloves of garlic in their papery skins,

Carrots sliced lengthwise, a handful of cilantro.

Sprinkle with sea salt, concentrated tears from ancient creatures.

Squeeze the juice of half a lime to leach minerals from the bones.

Bring to a boil, then lower to a bubbling simmer.

Let the sound transport you to the kitchen of your childhood,

Where your Nani worked her culinary magic,

She who’d fled the fires of poverty and war.

Drizzle olive oil into your favorite blue pot.

Chop onions into tiny cubes.

Let them sting your eyes and draw out your grief.

Cry for the friends whose houses burned to cinders.

There, but for the grace of the Divine, you go.

Drop the white cubes into sizzling oil,

Stir until transparent and then golden.

Chop your fears and nightmares,

Your nostalgia for the way life used to be.

Chop cloves of garlic and celery stalks.

Stir the sauté, el salteado, the mirepoix

from crisp to oily soft. Let the flavors blend

in the crucible of enameled iron.

Ladle on bubbling broth.

Rinse and cut potatoes, green beans, zucchini,

Leaves of kale, collards, and a rainbow of chards,

Add the yields of the Victory Garden.

Some victory.

Take out chicken pieces with a slotted spoon,

Place on a plate to cool. Wash your hands.

Sit down for the task of deboning.

Add to the soup the fibers of nourishing pale meat.

Set aside skin, bone, sinew,

Every bit the children won’t like,

Just like your Nani used to do for you.

Boil them in the broth pot again to make

mineral-rich gel, nutritious gold.

What heals every cold and flu,

Mends broken bones and broken hearts,

True milk of Mother Earth, the Broth of Life.

Sing. Allow time for the simmer.

Wash a few dishes, take veggie scraps out to the compost.

Cook each vegetable to soft perfection.

Stop before they turn to mush.

Turn off the blue flame.

Lift the lid, watch the golden droplets of chicken fat

Gather at the edge. Inhale.

The whole house smells of your Nani’s caldo de pollo.

Sprinkle bright green flecks of chopped cilantro.

Ladle lovingly into jars, place snugly in baskets.

Drive to where displaced friends are staying,

Climate activists turned climate refugees.

Deliver masked, with proper social distance.

You thought you could only handle one disaster at a time,

But this is the Apocalypse, remember?

There is wildfire, Black lives lost,

Rising fascism from Republican rot,

The looming climate crisis

Waiting to devour us all, if not by fire,

by hurricane, flood, earthquake, or plague.

We must remember Covid and protect each other.

Who needs more reasons for “I can't breathe”?

Hand over the basket.

All you can see of your friend’s face

Are her tired eyes above the mask.

“I wish I could hug you,” you say.

“Let this soup enter you and heal you,

that we may rise again together,” you pray.