Young Writers Society

Provided you weren't redirected here by the same story...

If you are interested, this poem is heavily inspired by the antagonist in a short story called "Black Snakes and Burnt Candles." If you found this piece interesting, and can stomach a bit of gore, you may enjoy this story too. You may find it in my "Short Stories & Poetry" folder, or through the link below.

Thank you for reading!

Black Snakes And Burnt Candles

If a tree falls and nobody is there to see it, does it make a sound?

Beauty is such an impossible thing to define because it varies wildly across culture and time. As was pointed out, someone who is beautiful to one person is ugly to another. Unfortunately, a part of the human experience is to fixate on our negative memories and experiences. You could receive hundreds of compliments, but it's the disparaging remarks we get that keep us awake at night. Even though many people will find us beautiful, it is the people who find is ugly who outweigh that on the scale, other's opinions of us are not made equally.

"Beauty feels so ghostly;

It's there one moment and gone the next"

When one compliments us on our beauty, the warmth and satisfaction we feel from that appreciation quickly fades as soon as we're reminded that someone else finds us ugly.

Though, as pointed out in the poem (Or what I got out of it anyway), this all brings up a very existential question. If beauty is purely subjective, is anyone really, truly beautiful? Or is it all just an illusion? For many of us who determine a large amount of our self worth by our looks, this can be a very haunting question, one that can drive someone to insanity if given enough thought, and that seems to be what's happened here. It's resulted in a desperate plea to some higher power to grant true beauty, even beyond that of human subjective opinion, by this poor individual. And true beauty, as they seem to put it, is a place where beauty doesn't exist at all. Where we cannot measure each other by some arbitrary beauty standard, and we are therefore not burdened by the weight of other's perceptions and expectations of us based on our looks.

That's what I got out of this, anyway. I thought this was really good, thank you for writing it!

Hello there, human! I'm reviewing using the YWS S'more Method today!

Shalt I commence with the reviewing?

Top Graham Cracker - This poem is from the perspective of The Witch and what she thinks of beauty.

Slightly Burnt Marshmallow - I guess if you wanted to you could talk about what happened to make The Witch the way she is, but I think that this poem is fine.

Chocolate Bar - I like how the word “all” is in bold, because it shows how much The Witch wants everyone to see the world the way she does. She doesn’t want anyone to judge one another by looks alone, she just wants them all to see the real meaning of beauty.

Closing Graham Cracker - It goes well with the story and well with the character of The Witch. She was once human, but became a monster. All to escape her shackled life.

I wish you an amazing day/night!