2517. Poet Laureate

Sadie was excited. She couldn’t believe how everything conspired to meet at the same time. She rarely wrote poems and then out of the blue she had scribbled down three. They were about Nature and saving the planet. She thought they were very good!

On the same day an advertisement appeared in the paper. It was sponsored by the National Poets’ Society. “Send three of your poems about Nature and saving the planet. We will publish a selection of the best in an anthology. From those selected we will choose one writer to be the country’s next Poet Laureate.”

The country’s official Poet Laureate was an annual appointment. Sadie knew her poems were good enough; after all she had a post-graduate degree in traditional Cornish oral poetry. She hastily emailed her poems. The results would be known in two months’ time.

Would she need to travel if she was chosen as Laureate? Would she have to move house and live in the capital city? Perhaps she should have checked these things out before sending in her submissions. She spent some time researching online, and in the end concluded that being selected would have no drawbacks for her. It was exciting to think about it!

Certainly her poems – or at least one – would be selected for the anthology. But would it take her to the next level and be chosen as Poet Laureate? How those two month’s dragged. And then she got an email:

Dear Sadie – could you write a brief paragraph about yourself? Who you are and what you have done in the past?

This was proof that she would be selected. Yes! They wouldn’t have asked for that if they weren’t going to publish.

The two month’s wait drew to a close. And then another email arrived:

Dear Sadie – thank you for your poems. You are our new Poet Laureate!

(Author’s note: Ha! Ha! Hopefully I fooled you, dear Reader, by not going in the direction you may have presumed, i.e. that she was rejected!)