Write to the City
by Kelly Pyzik
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This summer, more than 100 students from five US cities came to Chicago for a week to hone their craft and see the city in new ways with Write to the City, the annual hip-hop poetry-writing camp organized by Young Chicago Authors. During their visit, the young poets went to the MCA to see Kerry James Marshall: Mastry and then wrote about what they learned from Marshall's work and about the ekphrastic art movement. What follows are a few poems performed during the camp as well as a poem inspired by the exhibition.
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## Audio ---- ## They Always - By Mahnoor Jamal - City: Chicago Louder Than A Bomb Squad intern After Kerry James Marshall's _Silence Is Golden_ and _The Lost Boys_ - They always tell us to be quiet - Police tape our mouths shut - Because talking Urdu Arabic Punjabi terrorist is a crime - So children don't learn Ami's language - Baba teaches them English first - Doesn't want bullets of hate crimes breaking through their lives - Childhood turned into constant assimilation - Before culture can even try to seep its way in - Told not to mention Isis the word bomb or anything of that matter - For the fear of constantly being monitored - Jokes about being in group calls with the government Always have a bit of fear in them - They always tell us to be quiet - Know our voice is a weapon - So they police tape our mouths shut - Or at least try to - Don't know bullets can't break a child's love of their mother tongue - We mention terrorism in our activism - Stating we are not the face of Terror - Brown skin does not scream threat - Brown skin does not scream at all - And if it does we want the government to hear battle cries - With the peaceful hum of the azan next to it - Want them to hear that we're onto them - No that they bomb Our Land - Terrorism masked under hegemony - Don't call it that though We'll call it that though - Give them more of a reason to tape our mouths shut - to police us - To surveillance Brown bodies - To waste bullets on innocent They always warn us to be quiet```