Waiting for the snowstorm to end

By Fanny Barakaeva

Some do not fear it,

While to others it is their greatest fear

It slowly covers the earth in a blanket,

A blanket of irrational destruction

The snowstorm puts the juice of a flower over our eyelids

It suffocates all that is alive underneath it completely.

It makes us slowly fall in

Fall  into the world that slowly is dying

Yet we do not care, as our eyes are blinded

And we believe that everything will be fine

That someone else will do our bidding

And shovel our sidewalks for us.

So stop making phone calls to god

And begging for the storm to stop

The storm will not stop unless we all

Gather together and fight it off

We must gather together to show it

That we are not afraid, that we can survive

The cold is nothing to the power we have.

By Fanny Barakaeva

This poem demonstrates that in order to create change, we must start it ourselves. The entire poem is a metaphor itself, since the author compares a snowstorm to the world, describing the storm as if it is the world that is suffering. There are two main inquiry questions that refer to this poem, which are “Why do some people not embrace change?” and “What makes people decide to trust others?” since the poem mentions that a lot of people leave the destructing world to someone else, hoping they will fix it, hoping they will “shovel their sidewalks” for them, since they themselves are afraid to do anything about it. One allusion in this poem is about “the juice from the flower” from Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, since the flower in the play made people believe and love something they truly didn’t, and in the poem, it is mentioned that a lot of people force themselves to believe that the world is fine and does not require a change. Another allusion in this poem is the phone call to god from Dead Poet’s Society, since in poem, the phone call is a symbol for an irrational hope or thought, even though deep inside the one who makes the call knows that what they hope for will never happen, as it was the same in the movie. Lastly, the picture is symbolic, since the snow, which is a metaphor for destruction, covers the entire earth, leaving not a single piece of land underneath it, which symbolizes that the earth is buried with the fact that no one ever tried to stop this from happening. Everyone just waited for the storm to be over.

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