“I speak to you / terrorists, skyjackers, lifejackers / and otherwise-flavored peddlers / of sacred hearsay,” she began.
The 16-year-old from San Diego and four other high school students have been selected as the 2016 national student poets, and will spend the next year sharing their poetry, and encouraging others to write their own.
“I speak to you / for senseless violence / has no part in my definition of humanity,” Maya said, ending her poem. “I speak to you / because blind faith / is no faith.”
The five-year-old program created by the Obama administration honors student poets from five areas of the country. Students begin the program by reading their poetry at a White House reception, then spend a year attending poetry classes and art festivals, and doing community service projects. Past student poets have focused on teaching poetry to female prison inmates, wounded veterans or children.
Maya said she hasn’t decided on a project, but she would like to work with immigrants, especially children. She is the oldest daughter of Lebanese Americans, and the two poems she provided as examples of her work discuss the intricacies of being Arab American and about the effects of war.
When she visited Lebanon with her father toward the end of middle school, she began to think of herself as a writer.
“It was when I realized that being Arabic could be seen as different, and not in a good way,” she said. “It really made me question my identity, what does it mean to be Arab or American?”
Maya said she’s often inspired by news events, and writes poems on the bus or between classes.
“There’s always these free spaces when no one is asking anything of you and no one tells you, this is this deadline. That’s where my mind can kind of gallivant wherever it wants,” she said.
Students also get a $5,000 scholarship. Maya, a junior at the San Diego High School of International Studies, wants to study psychology or diplomacy, hopefully at a California university.
The event was another in a series of lasts before the Obamas leave the White House in January, and First Lady Michelle Obama got teary-eyed as more than a dozen alumni of the program stood to recite portions of a poem about how being a National Student Poet changed their lives.
“We knew that we wanted to use this incredible platform of the White House to inspire our young people to dream really big for themselves, to think about what their lives could look like beyond what their everyday existence is like,” Obama said.
More than 70,000 10th and 11th grade students have applied through the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, with just five selected each year by a panel of poets and artists.
“We chose you because we believe you can handle this,” she told the newly crowned poets, some of whom were visibly nervous. “You never know where you’ll end up.”
Here’s the poem Maya read at the White House:
sacrilege incorporated
i speak to you
terrorists, skyjackers, lifejackers
and otherwise-flavored peddlers
of sacred hearsay
i speak to you
just fyi
just for your illumination
god is not
a mcdonald’s franchise
you don’t hold any right to sell, market, or
otherwise operate in his name
i speak to you
for now is the time
to open your eyes
to close your pocketbooks
no prophets have ever had
swiss bank accounts
i speak to you
for if you love god
you would not lie
in his name
you would not kill
in his name
you would not explode
in his name
i speak to you
for the only god you seem to know
is the god of destruction
always thirsty
for more blood, more tears,
more futures gone wrong
i speak to you
for children
belong to no creed
and if holiness exists
it is the selflessness that runs in their
veins
i speak to you
for the magnetic attraction of violence
keep no home
in the nonpolar
hearts of the young
i speak to you
for senseless violence
has no part
in my definition of humanity
i speak to you
because blind faith
is no faith
Follow @sarahdwire on Twitter.
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