‘Cycle’: A Poem to Remind Us of Lives Lost Before the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
Before Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, before Eric Garner was choked to death in New York and before the #BlackLivesMatter movement had even begun, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and countless other unarmed black men had been slain by police.
Artwork by Rina Prel inspired by Abriana Jetté's poem "Cycle." (Rina Prel)
Before Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, before Eric Garner was choked to death in New York and before the #BlackLivesMatter movement had even begun, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and countless other unarmed black men had been slain by police. Listen to Abriana Jetté’s haunting poem, which references the tragic deaths of Diallo, Bell and even Emmett Till, and read along below.
Abriana Jetté reads “Cycle.”
Cycle
By Abriana Jetté
— For Amadou Diallo (1975-1999)
nine less than Sean Bell
seven years later and yet all things still the same same front stoop
same pebbles being kicked same stump same flag
same everything i said it because she said fifty bullets sounded
like one giant cloud of rain i say it sure sounds like justice being hung
from a tree in Money, Mississippi, like a reminder
don’t you try and live boy don’t you live (how does one live?)
your mother lived with an extra million for every forty one not guilty
rounds lived without a son to spoil
Abriana Jetté is the editor of “50 Whispers: Poems by Extraordinary Women,” which debuted at No. 1 in women’s poetry on Amazon.com. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in dozens of journals, including The Iron Horse Literary Review, River Teeth, The Moth, Poetry Quarterly and many others. She lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches for St. John’s University and the City University of New York. For more, please visit abrianajette.com.
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