A free-verse protest dedicated to the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.
The Bloom of Disquiet
I am born on Juneteenth
to disquiet by lynchings
from my shelter of privilege,
to find history leveled
under voices once muted,
now megaphoned
from Minneapolis to London.
I am disquieted
by a father’s breaths,
taken under knee
and divisible
by the wrong room
where Breonna was shot.
Disquiet reboots
the me that I was.
I have chosen to be
a speaker in tongues
for free verse
aloud with alarm
when lynchings
are deemed suicides.
No more.
I will resonate
with the pleading
of a father’s breaths,
taken under knee
and divisible
by the wrong room
where Breonna was shot.
No more.
I will resonate
with the thunder
that peals from white pages
when a jogger
is run down
and the sheriff knows.
No more.
I will resonate
from the still of the ground
fertile with silence.
I will bloom
to the struggle
and beauty of shouting,
“Black Lives Matter!”
like a rose, unweighted.
I am grounded,
stemmed beyond dew,
to thorn out in protest
in the hue of every drop
spilled with injustice and a gun.
Salvation snaps to mimic
a relapse of larynx
gathered around the globe
in the midst of pandemic
where I aim my outcry,
not silenced,
I will post and will share
Black Lives Matter
beyond a still in the moment
where all matters
are rebuked at random
en masse, provoked to MAGA
by Twitters to Tulsa.
Born in New Orleans, Dionne Charlet is a published American poet of FrancoIrish decent. A former Renaissance festival queen and entertainment writer, Dionne is disabled by a benign brain tumor and dysautonomia. She lives with her husband and Boston BullPug in Isabel, LA.
