After feeling silenced by the confluence of the George Floyd murder in 2020 with the overwhelm of the pandemic, I found myself preoccupied with an historical event I had not felt ready previously to reflect on—an insurrection, coup, and massacre in my home state of North Carolina occurring in 1898. I began exploring the history of it and writing a series of poems and found that each poem both responded to historical research and, in turn, led me to seek out more research and to reflect on psychoanalytic contributions to topics like collective reparation. The sequence has been a reminder of the ways we turn to language and are changed in turn by it as we seek to alter our relationship to the various traumatic. It also highlights how both poetry and psychoanalysis involve being called to tell the truth.