by Daria Smith Giraud
You See, this trauma is branded, #BlackLivesMatter
— co-opted, a corporation with corporate donations. A
black girl like me, will never spend or touch.
You do, however see and feel its binding residue
its Black Magic Matter surging the well of tears from
my mothers’ mothers’ mothers’ injustice. Blood-borne lips
of little white boys and girls marching with picket signs once
entitled to the We Shall Overcome sit-in Sixties babies.
These tears are my Fêtes De Bayonne rushing in like Katrina over the levies
uncontrollable shock of seeing Portland porcelain crowds’ shudder
black pavement boxing the air with their Martin Luther King martyr calls
to the Awakening of this moment “Breonna”… “Floyd” …“Defund”…
their uniting cries shrill the ley lines of a tumbling confederacy
its melodies and illegal graffiti yantras resurrect a just moral past
never existing on these shores, within these borders, from their ancestors.
We are all calling to our Mothers, George. Watching these peculiar Gemini rituals.
Polarized by the separation of our sovereignty and our glorious
Elysian return. Splitting open the identity of who and what we are.
The terrorizing venom of the hate that hate gave you,
Our mentally shattered former selves becoming The Other
transcending the collusion, I witnessed on their gentrified lawns. You see,
I KNOW black lives matter. A black girl like me, buried by the Burdens
of Being b-L-A-C-K. Reminded every day, for forty years and forty nights,
in the wilderness of the American corporation. I died a million times
witnessing the KuKulKlan conquirere the minds of little black
boys and girls. Their mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers
and grandpas’ black bodies flailing—those Mississippians. Their angelic
serpent gods metamorphosed christian demons destroying generations under
the bounty. There a black crow caws under the sun eating at their flesh.
Leaving this little black girl, the wings of war cries in the memories
of those Black Lives this Black martyr George, awakened in everyone and everywhere,
crying their no-more-death songs. Burning like crosses the police cars, their stations,
and the corporations they swear to protect. We are all dying George,
our ritual song sung repeatedly over imaginary ancestral bodies
“We can’t breathe” even in the rising of our coronas. Forgetting
this quantum timeline has its Gemini twin flame! Existing right now—We are
the Kachina Star the Zuni prophesized. Apocalypse lifting. Apocalypse
exposing. Apocalypse showing. Our emperor has no clothes, George.
We are all left naked in the streets of the unlawful lawless. We are all
locked and loaded. Wearing the wings of our ancestors ready to confront
the making of our complacency. Rising from our silent auctioned graves
the ones who survived, George. No plague, no locust could kill us.
That Tower card tumbling, Wendy’s is on fire, George. We are
the Kachina Rising, the Warriors of the Rainbow. Let this be a warning,
George. “African Americans history (DID NOT) start in Slavery.”
And at this Corona rising, we risk the all of humanity being shackled
by their fear of our collective power —lest cycles repeating with Martin,
Oh Marvin, “What’s going on,” this Vietnam on homeland. Our security
decimated off camera. No, it will not be televised. Stand firm in this constitution.
This revolution must stand unwavering, unapologetically loud, fearless
in the face of death, by any means necessary. Because, A black girl like me,
conjurer with an infinite soul my gavel is the pen institutionalized racism
in the form of a history its weaponized mental illness burning like the comets
to a new day. We must make this the 2012 our ancient fathers and mother klans
cosmically called the End of Days. Because George, if all of this is naught
and we are lulled back to sleep, the Orwellian tales will come to pass and our
children’s children will be the zombies paraded like the horror fiction of our minds.
Where we will look upon these days knowing Black Lives Mattered, for us all.
Category: Featured, Poetry, SNHU Creative Writing, SNHU online creative writing, SNHU Student