on late blooming guilt

below is a poem I wrote in the fall of 2024, reflecting on my feelings of guilt around avoidance of the horrors. this October, I was made to witness the tragedy firsthand (image 1).

I heard that the lilacs were blooming in September, though I never saw it with my own eyes.

I felt some regret that I didn't seek them out, Lilacs, my favorite scent of spring. But it's not spring.

I think a part of me didn't want to go looking for them. To face evidence that this world is changing. Not just bizarre, something more beautifully sinister.

I never want to acknowledge

the bad thing

the wrong thing

the scary thing

I used to witness all of it

I used to scream until my lungs gave out

I used to feel it all in my very core- marrow of my bones

and wear myself out with the injustice of it all

Too many wrong things - one on top of an unresolved other - I chose to tune it all out.

In turn I lost touch with myself.

Like the lilacs lost touch with their own circadian rhythm, I could no longer sleep at night.

So while a part of me is relieved I never saw the September lilacs, most of me is guilty.

The same guilt I feel when I scroll past a dismembered child. A mother starving to feed her child filthy flour. Another bomb in a newer place. Another neighbor snatched off or murdered in the street. My city's unhoused brutalized. My own chosen family's right to exist denied.

I can't keep turning away and I have no voice left to scream with.

All I do these days is witness

grieve

pray to some uncertain force

love the people around me

and wait for the lilacs to return in spring while the fires burn down the bushes all around us.