"When Terror Dreams" Written By Milena Grubor

Before their flags and hymns arose,

Before the conquest’s quiet prose,

A sovereign world in peace remained,

Until the first red earth was stained.

Those first-born nations met the flame,

A thousand deaths without a name.

The fires climbed, the rifles sang,

And innocence beneath them rang.

Then iron chains and brutal lore,

Were carried through the nation’s door.

Black men were sold as flesh and wage,

Their lives confined to whip and cage.

From stolen lands to auctioned breath,

They built a kingdom fed by death.

And every creed they claimed to keep,

Was written where the anguished weep.

A gentle voice rose, firm yet mild,

A dreamer speaking undefiled.

His truth was met with fear supreme,

And silence crushed his rising dream.

Still through the fields where sorrow clings,

Where memory coils and history stings,

The record none can bury speaks,

Through bitter soil and broken weeks.

And when they praise their gilded past,

A tremor cuts their triumph’s cast.

For nothing born of blood and screams

Escapes the hour when terror dreams.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” - Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)