stolen thunder
By Carolyn Zheng
We see these grand beasts working so hard trying to survive and provide for their families, but with one bullet, hunters and poachers can kill them and all of their life’s efforts.
the lion chases the gazette powerful sinew and muscles work in tandem it pounces kills and feasts with its cubs until a man appeared with a shining metal gun thunderstruck leaving scorched black and cubs Alone.
Girls Write Now On the Other Side of Everything: The 2023 Anthology
Do you know what it’s like to communicate with your family across a salty ocean’s divide? Do you want the sun and moon to enter your home with stories written in embers? Do you seek voices that will punctuate the darkness? Welcome to the other side of everything. It’s the other side of silence, the other side of childhood, the other side of hate, the other side of indifference, it’s the other side of sides, where the binary breaks down. It’s a new paradigm, a destination, a different perspective, a mindset, a state of openness, the space between the endless folds in your forehead, hopes for tomorrow, and reflections on the past. This anthology of diverse voices is an everything bagel of literary genres and love songs, secrets whispered in the dark of night, conversations held with ancestors under the sea.
Process
I’ve always wanted to write poetry, so I decided to try. For this poem, I was thinking about how much people have to struggle to survive. I have also been recently reading the book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. In it, it talks about how even if the two gangs—the greasers and the Socs—continue to fight. everything remains the same. Both concepts don’t apply only to humans either, I realized. Animals work hard to survive and provide for their families, just like humans. However, it doesn’t change the fact that they can never win against humans. Our technological advancements are something that natural evolution can’t win against. Poaching is evidence for that fact. Once I realized that, I just wrote something down. My mind first thought of a scene from a nature documentary where a lion or cheetah was chasing its prey, so I started with that and went along with whatever I conjured up.
Carolyn Zheng
Carolyn Zheng is a freshman from Massachusetts who hopes to one day be an author. She loves band, math, Spanish and English classes, but when she’s not in school, you can usually find Carolyn with her nose tucked in a book. She also tries to practice her trumpet, which she has been playing for four years, with some success. Carolyn is ambitious—she has too many goals and dreams floating around in her head to count.
