Diamonds, Vultures, and the Pulitzer Prize

Yesterday was a lively day. Two exciting outings: lunch with my auntie and then a visit to a local thrift shop. I’m telling you, they were the epitome of liveliness. Especially when I found the bargain of the decade: a diamond pendant on gold serpentine chain, marked $2.

Nonchalantly, I strolled up to my favorite jeweler’s shop with the diamond necklace in my pocket, practicing what I would say: “I just want to confirm that these ‘diamonds’ are glass….oh, really?....10 beautifully clear diamonds?....Worth HOW MUCH?....Can you believe I paid $2 for the necklace?....What extraordinary luck!”

But alas the jeweler wasn’t open, so I came home and rummaged around for the magnifying glass to read the symbols on the gold clasp. There was an O….an N….something like an A at the beginning….ah, crap, that’s a V next to it….AVON! It’s a blasted AVON necklace! Well, pooh. They were diamonds for an hour.

But God had something better in store: a red sunset on storm clouds, a glorious light show in the southwest, jagged bolts of lightning followed by reverberations of thunder. Lightning lit up the darkness, and thunder rumbled its way up my legs.

As the light show crackled around me, I came inside and dashed off a poem that I dreamed would someday earn a Pulitzer Prize. The whole day was about transformations of simple things: glass into diamonds, blue sky into evening wildness, vultures into hawks. Does it get any better than this? If it does, I will have to swoon.


Buzzard

She looks up and sees you riding the wind over the landscape,
and something—your freedom? your effortless wings lifting you
where she wants to go, on the updrafts straight to heaven?
—something about you makes her gasp Oh! A hawk!

She sees you not as you are but as she dreams you are. She’s busy
rewriting history in her head, remaking the whole world. A new
creation arises from her dying brain, and it is all so miraculous,
she needs a new language to speak of it. Nouns become verbs,
gerunds grow wings, words take flight in the midst of a sentence
and escape through open windows in her mind.

Oh, hawk! she cries, mesmerized by the circles you carve in the sky,
by your wide black wings like arms outstretched and fingers reaching
to grab onto God. She transforms you with a word. Vulture no longer,
you are majestic. You are not a scavenger, seeker of the putrid dead.
You are now the great hunter who has harnessed the wind
and she would ride you, if only you would please snatch her up.