Children with the Sad Wisdom of Age
10-year-old girl shot and killed at her birthday party
Englewood residents, already reeling and enraged by the slaying earlier this month of a 14-year-old girl, spent Sunday struggling to absorb another tragedy: a 10-year-old girl killed by a stray bullet during her surprise birthday party. Deanna Woods (left), aunt of Siretha White, collapses in the arms of Siretha's sister, Davonna Woods, 18, on Sunday.
(Tribune photo by Chuck Berman) Mar. 13, 2006
From the mouths of babes - too old before their time.
-- DC Native
Why are we fighting to live if we're living to die?
By Shontanette Brinson, 8th grade
Published, Chicago Tribune, March 19, 2006
THE CHILDREN SPEAK
Imagine that, last weekend, you saw your friend shot to death at her 11th birthday party. Imagine that this wasn't the first time you had lost a friend to a bullet meant for someone else. That another girl from your neighborhood, a little older, had been killed the week before, the girl everybody thought was going to make it out. Then imagine all the others who died before them, the boy who was strangled just before the school year started, the fathers and cousins and aunts and brothers. Last week, some of the pupils at Vernon Johns Community Academy, the grammar school that both Starkesia Reed and Siretha White had attended, wrote letters and poems to the two girls who died eight days and a few blocks apart. Now imagine, amid the angry marches, the rhetoric and political posturing, that you can hear the voices of the children of Englewood:
Why are we fighting to live if we're living to die?
Why are we fighting for love if it only makes us cry?
Why are we fighting for gangs when all our colors are the same?
Why are we dying with no one to blame?
Why are we killing for all the wrong reasons?
Why are we dying every day, every month, every season?
Why are we worried that Daddy isn't coming home?
Why are so many children left in this world alone?
Why can't we go outside and play?
Why is Mommy worried that one of us may get hit with a stray?
What is the reason Daddy isn't coming home today?
Why do we have to sleep on the floor at night?
Why do we hurt and fight?
Can we all stand together and make all wrong right?
Why do people bring babies in the world like this?
Why did that bullet have to hit Starkesia?
Why didn't it miss?
Why does money make the world go around?
Why when we die we get put in the ground?
Why does it seem as our life changes in so many ways?
Why does it feel as we are living in our last days?
Why does this gang get into it with that gang?
When everyone lives in the same community and has the same things?
Why doesn't death scare me anymore?
Because death is a game and has reached its final score.
Why is it that when a person dies a baby is born?
Or is it that the person comes back reformed.
Why is it that we are focused on the good and never expect the bad?
Why after we laugh, we cry?
Why are we fighting to live if we're living to die?
Shontanette Brinson is an 8th grader at Vernon Johns Community Academy. She likes to write poetry and listen to music. She was friends with Starkesia Reed and Siretha White and said she was inspired by Tupac Shakur's "Runnin' (Dying to Live)" to write this poem.
posted by dcnative @ 4:53 PM
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