Wednesday Prompts: picture this

Wednesday Poetry Prompt: Write a picture poem.

picture this

in a slow motion setting

no fancy classic

metal or wooden frames

[picture this]

enslaved Africans rising

like the sun and the moon

genuine black stars

no longer in secret

reading and writing English

praying in tongue

not waiting for Juneteenth

building a novel Noah’s Ark

naming it Motherland then

fleeing the Americas

[picture this]

Jim Crow never born

soiled whites and colorful

fine linen and cotton are

the only separate but equals

[picture this]

the bullets that missed

President Obama missed 

the I'm black and I'm proud 

flesh of Martin Luther King Jr.,

Medgar Evers, and Fred Hampton too

[picture this]

Greenwood District

conceived and perceived

as a yellow brick road to blacks

not green with envy to whites

[picture this]

from the beginning

Carolyn Bryant telling 

the truth and Emmett Till 

survives the heat of the Delta

in Chi-town he throws 

the first pitch at a Chicago Cub

or at the Jackie Robinson’s 

World Series game

[picture this]

Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair,

Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley

skipping down the stairs

of the 16th Street Baptist Church

singing “We Shall Overcome”

in their Sunday’s best to

play hopscotch and jump rope

with Sarah Collins Rudolph

[picture this]

the punchline of a newspaper, 

on November 7, 1972 - reads

in big, black, bold letters

"Unbought and Unbossed:

Shirley Chisholm Wins",

the first woman to flip 

and color the presidential map blue

[picture this]

there was no color of change

no HBCUs since 1837

no NAACP founded on 1909

no record of The Crisis in 1910

no CORE in 1942

no Civil Rights Act of 1964

no Voting Rights Act of 1965

no Black Panthers on the loose in 1966

to black lives matter today 

[picture this]

discrimination blind in both eyes

racism getting water hosed down

no strange fruit dangling from trees 

only injustice lynched and

inequity spat on

[picture this]

hate unrecognizable

in a closed casket

buried deep with no mourning

and love 

the only rainbow coalition

we all sat in and stood peacefully for

💜D'ElegantOne