banjo and the lilac tree

I trace lilacs as they grow by the hillside, a hundred or so poems for those who survive. I move from one to the other like I have done so many summers before. I bite the air and when the sun meets my arm, it feels like somebody loves me — despite any failings or misfortunes one may think I have. The sun does not care to remind me that I have had bad days or how I have ignored the doorbell when it rang or how I have wondered what the point of something was even if it meant everything to somebody else. No, the sun just lifts its head and in doing so, gives rise to a joy like no other.

Knowing how many days I have lived without the warm sun or the lilac tree blooming makes me clutch to the moment, these moments, where I know so well that it will all inevitably come to leave me behind. What was once a bookshelf will soon become dusty and the spines of the books will no longer open without the crackling sound of pages touching pages. Where there was nothing, there is now something. Where there was something, there is now nothing. Such is the way of our strange, strange lives.

— 

When I come to the lilac tree, I come to know all there is to know about living. It happens until it doesn't. The lilac is blooming until it is not. Your love is here until it is gone and so I drift, I drift and I drift until there is nothing else to do but untie my shoes and watch the tiny purple buds once attached to the tree fall to the grass and go away with the wind. One day, that will be me, that will be you, but not yet, there is still living in our lungs and lilacs growing on that tree. Summer afternoons with a banjo bigger than my pocket, what will become of the hazy sun and the little green sprouts that line the backyard garden? What will be loved and what will be forgotten?

outfit details: eshakti custom made dress, savers/thrifted sunhat

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