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.
Taking Root: The Girls Write Now 2022 Anthology
For more than two years, our young writers have weathered an adolescence shaped by an ongoing global pandemic. But a harsh climate can also produce work of rare depth, complexity, nuance and humor. The Girls Write Now mentees in this collection have found new ways to build community and take root. This anthology is a catalog of seeds—each young writer cultivating a shimmering, emergent voice. In short stories, personal essays, poetry, and more, they reflect on life-altering topics like heartbreak, self-care and friendship. The result is a stunning book with global relevance of all this generation has endured and transformed.
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.
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