For Renee Nicole Good: A life extinguished too soon

In Minneapolis, the air held its breath
the morning Renee Good’s name
slipped into the streets
like a wound reopening.

Chants rose, hungry and fractured,
each shot a mind unraveling.
Fear moved through the neighborhood
like a sudden cold front —
sharp, unsettling.
We wept for the erosion of humanity
by man-made alchemy.

Justice walked with blistered feet.
ICE vehicles moved like shadows,
turning communities into battlegrounds
where laws slept
and justice bled.

Citizenship became a question.
Belonging felt conditional.
Renee’s death cracked something open —
a reminder that even home
can become a place you fear to stand,
freedom’s promise worn thin,
patriotism used as a mask.

Civil rights felt fragile that day,
hazed by nostalgia and denial.
People of color walked with shoulders tight,
eyes scanning for danger,
whistle blasts warning neighbors.
ICE agents flooded the streets,
wrapped in too many uniforms
to reveal the human beneath.

In grief, we mourned Renee Good —
a life extinguished too soon.

Some carried signs.
Some carried sorrow.
All carried the weight of policy,
the burden of being named a threat
before being seen as human.

The streets answered first.
Voices rose — trembling, refusing silence.
Strangers stood shoulder to shoulder,
fear braided with defiance,
dignity carved from freedom’s fragile edge.

They marched not from bravery,
but from exhaustion —
tired of being told their eyes deceive them,
their truth weaponized,
their pain imagined.

Leaders spoke in rehearsed tones,
empathy thin as frost on glass.
They spoke of order, never of loss,
never of Renee Good,
never of the hearts left aching,
never of another life undone.

But the people remembered.

They raised their voices —
because silence is complicity.
They held Renee’s name
like a candle in the wind,
fragile, flickering,
refusing erasure.

Truth may drown in diplomacy,
but memory resists.
The people insist on presence —
raising voices in grief, in empathy, in truth.

They marched for their neighbors,
their communities, for freedom itself.
They mourned for every life undone,
for humanity, compassion, love —
for all touched by ICE’s gaslighting,
its quiet undoing.

This poem is for Renee Good —
a whisper against forgetting,
an echo for justice and humanity,
buried beneath the silence of power.

January 2026

 Dr. Sharon M. Holder lives in South Carolina. She holds a PhD/MPhil in Gerontology from the Center for Research on Aging at the University of Southampton, UK; a Master of Science in Gerontology from the Institute of Gerontology at King’s College London, UK; and a Master of Social Work from the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston, Texas. Dr. Holder discovered her love of poetry at the University of Houston–Downtown, where she published in The Bayou Review and the Anthology of Poetry. Today, she writes poetry as a practice of gratitude alongside her academic research.