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Note on Memorial Day (2025) is a protest poem by Abbie Cienna in response to attacks on First Amendment rights in the USA, and specifically, a systematic Anti-Black Erasure of U.S. history. She wrote the poem after a 2025 contest challenged writers to create original poems using a predetermined set of words and phrases inspired by those that were flagged for removal from U.S. government webpages and in research papers during the Trump administration. Note on Memorial Day (2025) includes 22 out of 101 of those “forbidden” words and phrases. In the poem, which uses a narrative poetry style, an ancestral narrator uses the narrative poetry style, along with alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, and rhythm to tell the story of events surrounding a magnificent Decoration Day ceremony in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865. It's a remarkable, though widely unknown, story of resilience and patriotism during The Civil War. Decoration Day evolved into what we now know as Memorial Day, which became a federal holiday in 1971. In Note on Memorial Day (2025), the narrator reaffirms Black heritage while challenging and confronting acts of erasing Black contributions from U.S. history. The title is a nod to Langston Hughes' poem, Note on Commercial Theatre (1940) in which Hughes critiqued the systematic erasure of the Black American experience from Blues music during his time. The narrator in Hughes’ poem ends with a passive reflection. In contrast, Note on Memorial Day ends with a dynamic warning for the audience.

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