My City
Community Artist: Maria James-Thiaw M.S., MFA
Poet and Professor
Mobtown’s eruption wasn’t
spontaneous,
a spark in the dark, it was
a slow burn, decades of racism,
like a black mold, that crept in
crevices of courts to
city government buildings,
a chasm of hopelessness
deepened by the sound of that
Memphis bullet
reverberated off the walls of our minds.
Crooked cops were the gas,
city corruption struck the match,
and when Martin fell,
flames rose up like mighty arms
enveloping my city.
The eerie orange glow of crackling fire,
breaking glass, screams, tears,
demands thrown up to the divine.
They came for my daddy
a leader
who could gather men
to fill the buckets
to put the fire out
but city water can’t extinguish
a century of pain
of living as a second class citizen
in the land of the so-called free.