Lillian Bertram's Poem Skittles For Trayvon

“In the beginning, there was a thrush with no song,” was said by the poet Lillian Bertram in her poem “Skittles For Trayvon.” Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is a 2014 recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship. She also has won multiple awards including the Phantom Press chapbook contest in 2013. The first book she wrote was called “But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise.” Bertram poem “Skittles for Trayvon,” was written to describe how a teenager walking down the street with tea and candy in his hand was looked at as a “terrible ghost,” which in the end cost him his life. After George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement became a nationally recognized campaign and publicized countless other cases relating to racial inequality in the US criminal justice system, police brutality and racial profiling.

In this paper, the following topics will be discussed; discrimination, fear, and justice. Discrimination in this poem deals with the troubled man judging the singing boy based on his presence. The fear in the singing boy’s eyes as the troubled man strangles every inch of breath in him. The singing boy’s justice was never given to him as the troubled man was acquitted of all his crimes. In the poem “Skittles for Trayvon,” Lillian Bertram uses metaphors to show the outcry of the singing boy’s experience of fear, discrimination and