The origins of this pem started off in a prompt for my Advanced Creative Writing Class - teacher had instructed us to write something mimicking America's Got Talent, though with a different suject. That's when I started cultivating this persona of someone who was beautiful and talented, but destructively so. From there, I went down a bit of a rabithole with the idea and started this poem exploring that 'persona' more. The hardest part about writing this poem was the title - it had originally been "She Rode The Sun," though I felt that it didn't really give the poem justice, and eventually settled on Athena. That being said, the main point wasn't for readers to envision a particular person or charachter when reading this poem, but to imagine someone in their own life and/or expirience who fits into this poem. 

I hope when people read this poem they get a sense of what beauty can be. It can be an innocent flower, or a wildly destructive force. Beauty is an intricate concept not fully formed - tere isn't just one standard for it, so why should anyone contain themseleves or the things they see around them to that one definition? Beauty is everwhere, even in disasters - hurricanes, tsunamis, rebels, etc. Beauty is not one concrete thing, but rather a fluid understanding of how we pereceive things. Beauty is not something to be gate-kept, it's something to be explored and evolved through writing and understanding.