(Note: August 28, 2025. I haven’t posted anything to an Open Link Night at dVerse Poets since I discovered the site a year and half ago, but I’ve been reading some of my older things recently, often just to reset myself a bit, get in the right frame, while working something new and was reminded of this one, the second response to a prompt I contributed after my dVerse discovery. It was the coolest of prompts)
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So, at a newly found for me “Poet’s Pub” of a site, dVersepoets.com, I came across a post that had a prompt to write what it refers to as a poetic Quadrille, a 44 word poem (not including the title) but in this prompt it said you need include the word “pinch” in any way you saw fit.
This I did and it is the most recent post in the Attic here, “Don’t Pinch Me”.
Well, came across another poem prompt yesterday that asked that you write a prequel for a character from literature.
Write a poem that is a prequel to a particular character from a nursery rhyme, Aesop’s fable, book , mythology etc.
And the responses that I have read thus far to this prompt are so imaginative and colorful and haunting that I can’t wait to finish them all.
But for me, after running through a few possibilities in my head, I thought to Edgar Allen Poe and the Raven and of the Raven himself.
.
Raven’s Night
I am not dead nor demon to be read or written of
I implore you open your door
or window
shutter’s curtains
flitting
with welcome inside out air
and any manner of candlelit care
with which to let me see your floor
please
just to walk that floor
or even alight that door
that I implore
again
you
to open
outside no place for me tonight
in weary last vestige of now blustery light
that casts shadows that scare me from flight
and I don’t scare
for I am Raven
confused of crow brethren
curse-ed cousins
but stronger than they even as they crow foot in a murder of friends
what they needs simple
with simples ends
while I seek only solitude and to depart nights
now
tired of taking flight in dark
reputation
just a me to be me but I am scared of he
and what I no longer want see
in the dim
even eves with path clear in crisp moonlight
but worse on nights like
these
this
this one
this night at hand
and I see your light
window
harks
a place maybe to land
and
I will make amends for this slight into
your solitude
.
For I am Raven
I can build things from sticks and stones
peck and grab and stab and stack and foot place just right
or even
build things from thoughts and words alone
to assist you
in candlelight
I just don’t want to flight
in dark
any longer
and
not this night
in most order
I just need walk a floor
or alight a door
allow
please
me bring inside
at least
for
this just one night
Frankenberry's Attic 
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