Am I Scared?

by Sanaa Beaufort

Am I scared?

March 12th, 2020 was the last time

I stepped foot into my school building.

That was the last time anyone

stepped foot into a school building.

News, news, keep watching the news

cause you don’t know what’s happening next.

If they’re even going to tell you

Jobs were lost .. no money... praying for a paycheck

Keep watching the news just to see our president make fun of a virus that kills,

“This is just a cold, FROM CHINA, it’s nothing.”

I knew he was bluffing.

Now families are motherless, fatherless grandfatherless

Because he could care less

About the lives of you and me.

If my soul was to leave my body there would be no tears shed

But let the economy take its last breath

he would be sitting there on his death bed

wiping his tears with Benjamin Franklin.

Am I scared?

Black Bloodshed on the hands of men

who are here to serve and protect again and again and again.

fellow brothers fathers sons killed.

Murder.

Protest.

Riots

in which I do not condone burning the cities and stores in our community

But if you feel what’s inside of me

From every whip every chain every rope every bullet

Every lynching every beating every whipping every shooting every little black boy thrown in a river to drown for the piranhas to eat

You Would want to burn something down too!

And that is only the physical

Mentally we have been lynched tortured drowned manipulated from all angles.

This is the endless cycle of “WE ARE TIRED.”

WE ARE TIRED IN A PANDEMIC -- that has targeted us too

am I scared tho ?

scared of what may happen during this election.

Scared this may be our only chance to change.

It's scary to leave the house. It’s even scary to sleep in my own house.

Love Bre Taylor. A target on my back as big as the ego of my white neighbor.

Law enforcement forgets that I am human.

They forgot what they represent.

They don’t understand the pain and struggle we get from losing our family members but they do understand the system

and will choose that job before a human black life.

Maybe I should correct myself in the way I use “they”

Maybe I should say a “few bad apples”

Which we cannot afford

Now that person is gone.

Surrounded by wooden boards

There is no return after that bullet hits their body. But now you wonder what was accomplished?

When the look of worry agony stress fear is crystal clear in my mothers’ eyes

It is identical to every black mother that ever existed in America

So, yes, I am scared

but not broken.

Not paralyzed either. I will live as long as I’m allowed to continue to stay alive.

I am scared but ready to fight.

Fight to rebuild the system that made Elijah McClain say ‘I'm sorry,”

that made Breonna Taylor awake in her sleep from a bang at the door,

and forced George Floyd to scream “I can’t breathe.”

And fight for the lives taken who were not caught on camera.

What else is there to do?

If we stop fighting

We won’t stop dying.

Sanaa Beaufort is in the 11th grade. and she enjoys lacrosse and theatre arts. A Muslim African American woman, she is dedicated but far from perfect. In the future, she wants to attend the New School of New York for directing or an HBCU. In addition to attending North Penn High School, she is also currently enrolled at North Montco Technical Career Center to study to become an EMT. Helping people as much as possible is something that she tries to do all the time. She believes that if you give a hand to someone you will get it back in return someday.