Hello Friends,
In today's poem, Nick Flynn does something that seems like it shouldn't work in poem: he spells out that he is giving you a metaphor by telling you the metaphor was your idea as a reader. He has the nerve to use italics on the word metaphorical in the middle of a poem — who does that?! How could you possibly pull that off? But then he takes back the reins on that metaphor as the poet to give you a little unexpected turn at the end. See what you think of this one —
Enjoy.
Ellen
You know how it pretends
to have a broken wing to
lure predators away from its
nest, how it staggers just out
of reach . . . if, at this moment,
you're feeling metaphorical,
nest can be the whatever
inside us that we think needs
protection, the whatever that is
small & hasn't yet found its
way. Like us it has lived so long
on scraps, on what others have
left behind, it thinks it could live
on air, on words, forever almost,
it thinks it would be better to let
the predator kill it than to turn
its back on that child again,
forgetting that one lives inside
the other.
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Nick Flynn's "Killdeer" was featured for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series on January 4, 2018.