THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
I never believed in the American Dream.
What I see is the American nightmare,
the Western nightmare,
where my ancestors were reduced to wild cattle
after the meticulous genocide of the Native peoples.
Segregationist laws sanctified negrophobia,
and supremacists still prowl
in the entrails of the United States.
How many Black lives gunned down,
for nothing but the color of their skin?
How many lives poisoned
by hatred, bullets, drugs, planned toxins?
They invite me to believe in Abraham Lincoln’s liberty,
yet his legacy remains that of a slaver
disguised as a liberator.
Racial prisons overflow with dehumanized Blacks.
At every checkpoint, persecution lurks.
Police killings
are no longer accidents,
they have become the macabre routine
of the country that sells the American Dream.
They speak to me of democracy,
yet this democracy feeds on carnivorous chains.
They speak to me of justice,
yet this justice condemns before it even listens.
They speak to me of freedom,
yet this freedom ends at the border of skin.
They built their prosperity
on fields soaked in blood,
on mines where chained slaves groaned,
on factories where Black children served as fuel.
Their flag waves like a hypocritical prayer,
while Black families collapse
before the coffins of their slain sons.
The American Dream is a carnivorous mirage,
a marketing legend
that disguises horror as opportunity,
suffering as achievement,
death as statistics.
Despite their supremacist prisons, their weapons of mass destruction, their negrophobic poisons,
we remain standing.
We carry in our veins
the indestructible memory of resistance.
We will never be the endorsement of their myth stained with obscurantism,
for we are the living proof
that their nightmare has not devoured us.
We advance, and we shall advance, with the indelible scars of our dehumanized ancestors,
yet these scars have become emblems of truth.
They remind the world that nothing can erase
the greatness of those who survived deportations, slave ships,
whips, rapes, burning crosses, lynchings, massacres,
gunfire and penitentiaries.
We are the heirs of a millennial endurance,
the bearers of a fire no ocean of persecution can drown.
They thought to reduce us to perpetual animalization,
yet we carved our wars, our histories, our memories,
into stone, into flesh, into time.
Copyright © Auguste Romain Nyecki | Year Posted 2025
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