Beneath this image of a pottery shard is a poem.
Romanticist in Color
I answered a call for a job
for a Romanticist in Color.
My favorite color is greyish-blue.
“We prefer a scholar of
ancient descent.” That covers
a lot of people, turns out.
I remember when they
found that mummy, Lucy,
who was our ancient ancestor.
She had had a hard life. Things
weren’t so easy in those days
as they seem to be right now.
You can tell a lot from their teeth.
And then the garbage pits have
lots of information, archeology-
wise. I spent some time in Sepphoris
on the Lower Galilee, digging on a dig.
We found coins and pots and lots
of shards. You dug down inch by
inch in perfect squares. The arch-
eologist who supervised my square
specialized in oil lamps made
of clay. One day we found a lamp.
Forgive me if I say he glowed,
but he did, I can see it. He was skinny,
tall, wore glasses, and had on a make-
shift turban. He is smiling at the lamp.
Myself, I found a mid-sized pot. It was
down in a hole and intact, except
for an angular missing piece at the rim.
That would be a shard. I was psyched
to find the pot—no coins inside, only dirt,
so everyone else was disappointed.
I guess barely broken pots were a dime
a dozen—so much for archeology!
But to return to the matter at hand,
in the end I never got that job.
They never tell you why, other than
“we decided to go in a different direction.”
But I’ve still got a couple of friends
in the game, and through the grapevine
I heard that it wasn’t anything wrong
with me or my application. It was just
an inside job all along, an internal hire
whose favorite color was bluish-grey.
---Andrew DuBois