“Out of a Crisis: The Voices of Our Students” is a new series, launched by the Globe’s Great Divide team, that publishes student essays, poems, artwork, and videos featuring teenage perspectives on learning and living amid a pandemic. The stories are published in the Great Divide newsletter.
About the author: Maceo Wright, 17, is a junior at English High School. Listen to Wright read his spoken word poem:
Damn Pandemic
I ain’t been sleeping
This damn pandemic really got me feelin
Like the world’s about to end so what’s the point of even dreamin
Too scared to close my eyes because of demons I’ve been seeing
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Got me waking up sweating scared shook ‘n heavily breathing
Nothing but negative stuff in headlines when I be reading
Cops done popped another brotha n’ left them on the floor bleeding
It’s like a freaking cycle I hear this “krap” every weekend
With everything that’s going on some peace of minds what I’ve been needing
Mine is clouded I get depressed the more I think about it
I swear sometimes it’s like they want to build the world without us
We fought for our equality but still there ain’t no balance
How we supposed to fight back when they holding all the power
Yo, Yo this world is just a mess
Get treated with disrespect because the color of our flesh
If I was to call for help would they see me as the threat
They killing the very people they swear they going to protect
On top of that my own problems I ain’t finished with yet
Think I got time to care about who we going to elect
We still struggling what happened to those stimulus checks
This what I deal with you could see why I’ve been feeling so stressed