This one took me some time to get out. Many rewrites later … it is what it is.
Today, we challenge you to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be. Perhaps your poem will feature a very relaxed brain surgeon, or a farmer that hates vegetables. Or maybe you have a poetical alter-ego of your own, who flies a non-wan, treasure-hunting flag with pride.
She comes in before dawn because that’s when the good things surface. She has a drawer full of what she’s found— a letter in a 1947 atlas, a grocery list inside Middlemarch: onions, butter, something crossed out, eggs; a crow doesn’t apologize for what she keeps. She’s moved the books she loves to eye level. Her system doesn’t match the catalog. A crow’s system never does. Ask her something difficult. Watch her head tilt—that particular angle; already she’s gone ahead of you into the stacks, one dark eye reading spines the way a crow reads a corn field: fast, without sentiment. She already knew where the answer lived. Knew it before you finished the sentence. A crow lands on exactly what it came for, closes its foot around it, and goes.
Prompt Backstory
Via NaPoWriMo
In his poem, “Treasure Hunt,” Prabodh Parikh brings us a refreshingly different view of what being a poet is like – that is, if you grew up on the cultural notion of poets being wan and ethereal, or ill and doomed. Parikh’s boisterous pirate of a poet might be an “unreliable” character, but seems like he’d be the life of any party, and quite satisfied with his existence.
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