Joyce Carol Oates also annunciates for a people whose stories are not often heard in her heart wrenching poem “Poetry is the Gnomic Utterance from Which the Soul Springs, Fluttering”. It tells of the power in which words can have. In Oates’ case, the power of what happen when we become a witness. Her poem relays the effects what we usually are not shown on the news; the reaction and the emotions that come with the baseless death of a child. The Black Lives Matter Movement has been largely defined by the unjustifiable killings of innocent and unarmed blacks. In Oates’ poem, the victim is a 12-year old black youth in a park with a toy gun, a toy in which the officer claimed was real and gave him the right to shoot the boy. We are upset, but
