Rising Back from the Ash of Mistakes

Rising Back from the Ash of Mistakes

(A Performance Poem)

There is something sacred in the ashes,

A truth that only burns bright when all has fallen,

When every step we took

Crumbles beneath us,

When every word we spoke

Echoes back in shattered fragments.

We don’t see it at first—

The beauty in the ruin,

The potential in the wreckage.

We’re blinded by the smoke,

Choking on the fumes of regret,

Unable to breathe for fear of what’s left behind.

But it is there.

In the charred remnants of all we have been,

There lies the secret.

The secret that says:

This is not the end.

For every mistake is a spark,

Every failure, a flame,

And we, we are the ones who rise from it—

Ashes to dust, dust to sky.

We are born anew with every fall,

Rebuilt from the ground up,

Not in perfection, but in the beauty of our scars.

For no flower blooms without first breaking the earth.

You see, mistakes are not chains,

Not weights meant to hold us down.

They are the soil in which we grow,

The fire in which we burn,

The trial that tempers us into steel.

I know the ache,

The hollow of "I should have,"

The sting of "If only."

I know how it feels to look back

And wish the past could be rewritten,

As if erasing the wrongs

Would make us whole again.

But life is not a pen with an eraser,

It’s a canvas,

And the brushstrokes of our mistakes

Are the strokes of wisdom.

Rising back from the ash of mistakes,

It’s not about pretending the scars are not there.

It’s about wearing them like a crown,

A crown forged in fire,

A crown made of lessons learned

And battles fought.

Mistakes don’t define us,

They refine us.

They break us open

And show us the strength within.

When everything we thought was certain crumbles,

We stand—

Not as the same person we once were,

But as a new version of ourselves,

One with clearer eyes and a fuller heart.

There is power in the rise,

In the refusal to stay down when the ground burns beneath us.

When the world tells us we’re done,

That we’ve reached the end,

We whisper back to the sky:

"I’m just beginning."

So, we rise.

We rise with the strength of all we’ve survived.

We rise with the wisdom of every wrong turn,

With the grace to forgive ourselves,

With the courage to face what’s ahead,

Knowing that the past cannot hold us,

For we are no longer defined by the mistakes we made,

But by the power we found in returning to the light.

We rise like the sun after the storm,

Like the phoenix,

Shining brighter because we’ve burned,

We’ve fallen,

And now, we rise—

Stronger, wiser,

A little more weathered,

But infinitely more beautiful.

So let the ash fall.

Let it coat the ground beneath us.

Let it remind us of where we’ve been,

But never tell us where we are going.

For the fire that once threatened to consume us

Has only made us rise.

And we rise again,

And again,

And again.

For in the ashes of mistakes,

There is always room for rebirth.

And we are the ones who keep rising,

No matter how many times we fall.

We are the ones who rise back,

Stronger, wiser,

From the ash of our mistakes.