Petrichor

The petrichor from tears in a desert city
not allowed to be deserted
its people playing a waiting game
they can’t get out of.
Mute children waiting for the final bomb.
Does blood mixed with sand also have a scent?

Tertiary trauma seems a new phenomenon
of a digital age
where genocide shows up on my phone
between comedy highlights
and relationship advice.
I feel tired and useless and stare instead
at the dappled light filtered through my houseplants.

Privilege weighs far less
than a child’s unconscious body picked out of the rubble;
the two together don’t sit well.
I reach for the old medicine of productivity
but the disease, it seems, has become resistent.
The disease is the medicine now: sorrow.

Dis-ease. Admitting ease
was never our inheritance.
Before I can move, I must be moved,
crying tears into English soil,
watering my houseplants in ritual,
before I return to the world to love it
fiercely enough to fight for it.