Day Five prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: write a poem in which you talk about disliking something – particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.
Day Four prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: craft [a] short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.
He listens carefully to the recounting of symptoms, performs some preliminary tests, and they discuss options for treatment.
A clean cloth is laid out at his side, with a tidy row of tools he will use to perform the operation
He selects the appropriate instruments, and sets to work. Prep, syphon, excavate the offending material, rinse, close, seal.
“All done,” he says, washing up at the sink with anti-microbial soap. “I fixed the leak, cleared out the s-trap, and replaced some worn washers. Your toilet should work fine now.”
“Oh, thanks, man,” says the homeowner to the plumber. “You saved my life.”
Day Three prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: Today, we challenge you to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be.
The canvas panel lays before me, blank and pristine. Or almost pristine. Scuff marked and yellow tinged; it's been sitting around for a while.
A horizontal penciled line, not quite centered. Top portion is the sky. Paint it blue, I’m told.
But skies aren’t out-of-the-tube blue on flat canvas. They’re deep, dappled with clouds sometimes, softened by invisible breezes at other times. Troubled by storms, subdued by dawn’s tentative tendrils. That all comes later, I’m told.
I dab at the blue mound on waxed paper. Oil or acrylic, I don’t recall.
Mom sits nearby, chatting with her friend who is -- ostensibly -- here to teach me art. They gossip – well, the friend does. Mom listens, jokes, commiserates. Passes judgment.
A large book lies open on the table, showing step-by-step how to recreate the painting: an old barn on a rutted dirt road alongside a generic, leafless tree.
Sketch the outlines as illustrated, I'm told. I don’t want to. This is someone else's painting, not mine. I don’t know what the barn has seen, what the tree has felt.
Who traversed the road to carve the ruts, Where were they headed? What did they find upon arrival?
I put lines on the canvas with a #2 pencil. That’s enough for tonight, I’m told. My mom and her friend barely glance at my work, make vague plans for a return visit. The friend leaves.
The half-blue, scuffed canvas sits on the floor in a dark corner of my bedroom closet. For years.
Day Two prompt from NaPoWriMo.net: “write [a] poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”
Day 26 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) .
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a sonnet. The strict rules of sonnets:
14 lines
10 syllables per line
Those syllables are divided into five iambic feet. (An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable).
Rhyme schemes vary, but the Shakespearian sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg (three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet).
Sonnets are often thought of as not just little songs, but little essays, with the first six-to-eight or so lines building up a problem, the next four-to-six discussing it, and the last two-to-four coming to a conclusion.
The “rules” are somewhat bendable, but I tried stay relatively true to the strict format. Herewith:
Sales Pitch (Read the Signs)
The sign says No Solicitors. You knock. Beware the Dog that lunges at my door. “The rats and piss ants this year run amok.” You’ll slay them all. They’ll bother me no more.
A spider egg sac hangs upon the wall. “A hundred spiderlings your home will fill.” More likely to my garden they will crawl to feast upon the bugs you wish to kill.
No rodents, bugs or crawlies bother me. The poison’s “safe for pets,” you persevere. My Wildlife Habitat sign plain to see; No chemicals have touched my yard in years.
Your sales pitch failed, now please just go away. My “pests” will live to see another day.
Day 23 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo)
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem that focuses on birdsong. I wrote about birds, but not songbirds. Oh, well. Here ’tis:
Bird Speak
Scrub-jay squawks accusingly at me from atop my backyard fence. What offence I may have committed, I do not know, but he’s got that “you know what you did” tone. “I shouldn’t have to tell you.”
Always a tricky situation. Do you try to guess, and risk confessing to something they didn’t even know you'd done? Do you ask forgiveness, even though you don’t know for what? Am I overthinking the meaning of this jay’s strident vocalizations?
My dog Chules joins me on the deck, and the scrub jay aims his admonishments at the pup. Now I know he’s just making stuff up. Chules is a good boy, and – while he’s been known to chase some wildlife now and again – he always gives them a good head start lest he actually catch something.
Rather abruptly, scrub jay zips his beak, and flits up into the canopy of the black walnut tree. A large black crow swoops over my rooftop and lands on the fence, inches from where the jay had been holding court moments ago. With one loud caw, he announces: there’s a new corvid in town. I don’t see a badge, but I won’t argue.
Chules and I are forgiven our sins, so long as we don’t try to pull any of that crap on the crow. Mind you, crow has no better idea of our transgressions than Chules and I do. We agree to his terms nonetheless.
Chules is tempted to run at the crow and scare him off the fence, but thinks better of it when he remembers being previously dive-bombed by said bird for just such behavior. I go back to pulling weeds, and the scrub jay… well, we likely won’t hear much from him for a while.
write a poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.
Something gone haywire? I give you:
The Constitution
There are three branches of government. No, wait… two. No… just one now. Well, that’s hardly a branch. We’ll just call it a stump.
There’s a president who executes the will of the people. No… they're a dictator. No… merely a puppet. We’ll just call them a toad. On the stump.
There are regular free elections. No, not free. Stolen. No… sold. To the highest bidder, who becomes the puppeteer of the toad on the stump.
There are governmental agencies meant to help the citizens. No, they’re for collecting data on the citizens, to be monetized by the puppies of the puppeteer who controls the toad on the stump.
There are citizens who are free and can pursue happiness. No, wait… freedom depends on the whims of the dictator, and happiness is crushed – like the spines of those who once served the people.
The people have a voice that cannot be silenced by the puppeteer or the oligarchs or the dictator or the slime that surrounds the toad on the stump.
Let’s use that voice to call back our liberty and freedom. Let’s remember we have “unalienable rights endowed by the Creator.” Let’s uproot the stump and cooperate to build back our nation.
write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration). One way to approach this is to think of a song you know and then basically write new lyrics that fit the original song’s rhythm/phrasing.
Roughly, based on the rhythm of Cat Stevens’ Wild World…
Thoughts
When I think about the things I do think, and I want to think of something new, I can’t help it but to think about you.
Think. How did I get here?
When the river runs deep, wide and slow, as if it’s got nowhere else to go, you know it’s teeming with life below.
Oh, maybe, maybe it’s the tide’s turn, I’m feeling shallow inside and maybe if I tried, turn, I wouldn’t have to run and hide.
So many times my eyes I’ve just kept closed. So many serpentine and dead ends chose, So many wrong-turned roads.
Think. How did I get here?
When I think about the things I do think, I wish I’d thought of something new. I wonder, do you feel the same way, too?
Day 15 of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo)
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a six-line poem that has these qualities: informed by repetition, simple language, and expressing enthusiasm. And so…
Special Delivery
It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming! I heard it in my sleep! Two streets down. Do you hear it now? Come outside! I can’t see it, but I’ll bark my head off anyway, and jump and paw at the fence, because it's coming: the day I finally break outta here and catch that mail truck!
try writing a poem that describes a place, particularly in terms of the animals, plants or other natural phenomena there. Sink into the sound of your location, and use a conversational tone. Incorporate slant rhymes (near or off-rhymes, like “angle” and “flamenco”) into your poem. And for an extra challenge – don’t reference birds or birdsong!
Here we go:
Pilgrim Ridge
Atop Pilgrim Ridge, miles from nowhere – no, that’s not an apt description; Nowhere is quite near, in fact it’s right here – crisp, pure silence defies definition until one acclimates to the endless sky, the light savory air, the rocky ground stubbled in dry remains of early summer wildflowers.
Leaning into the silence, one begins to hear the percussive opening of a breeze-soft symphony; gentle crackling of seed pods, split as the sun bears down, the shaker of seed shot falling to ground, a brush-on-cymbal swish of grasses swaying together, the guiro scrabble of chipmunks skittering up skinny pines to hide in long-needled shelter. And then the music ratchets up.
The chipmunks begin their cuíca scoldings. Wind chimes low tones in the clustered trees, now weaving. Grasses are folding in the hot air. A steady push now; no longer a breeze. Clouds scuttle in and the thunder drum shakes, first slow and lumbering, then brash, a crescendoing rumble that ends with a lightning-bright quake, and the diminuendo of tambourine rain.
What Rhymes with Stanza? 