Today, try writing your own poem that discusses a real or mythical being or profession (demons, firefighters, demonic firefighters) with the same sort of musing yet dispassionate tone.
My first instinct was a unicorn. Then a mermaid. Both felt too familiar—creatures so often reimagined they’ve lost whatever strangeness they started with. So I went looking for something less common and found the qilin, a creature from Chinese mythology that appears only at the birth or death of a great sage or ruler. I learned that because it exists only in relation to greatness, and greatness has grown scarce, the qilin is rarely seen anymore (not extinct, exactly) just waiting for an occasion that keeps failing to arrive. That felt like the right creature for this challenge.
They appear only for the great men, which is to say rarely now. The last confirmed sighting was four or five centuries ago, give or take. They do not bend grass. Whether the grass cares about this is not known. Their scales are probably green, or gold; it depends on the dynasty. The horn is sometimes there and sometimes not. The scholars do not agree, but they agree about very little. They eat nothing living. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps they are simply not hungry. When a sage is born, a qilin comes. When one dies, it comes again. Between these occasions it is somewhere unrecorded. . . . Their sound is like bells in a room you have just left. No one is in that room anymore.
Here is a video with more information about this mythical creature.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
In his poem, “Angels,” Russell Edson speaks of these spiritual warrior-messenger-guardians as if they were a type of endangered animal. Brief as it is, the poem is disorienting in its use of flattened diction, odd similes, and elliptical statements.
Upcoming…
A story by James Ron with a complementary poem:
IN A HOT SPRING, 2 May 2026
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