He’d be gone before the rubble settled. Leave a town burning in his wake, crushed stone slithering through cracks like sand in a broken hourglass, pooling empty hours into empty streets. This seafarer, spacefarer, carving out his stamp on a place so he might be able to see it from above when he glanced down at the ruins he’d built. He must have seen a beauty in destruction or why would he have sought out more?
First it was the slugs, then the pigeons, this year squirrels and not just the one hiding shells in the grates of our drain pipes. This year there’s a pair of them running track along the broken fence line.
Once there is time I must download one of those meditation apps and learn how to let go of the little things out of my control. I should make space for more me-time, worry less about the lives of others and untangle their questions from my existence. I read a quote once, it said we are more than what people make of us, which was nice but not so accurate when you’re an idea rather than a flesh sack and what people make of you, makes you more and more… I should learn how to trim down for summer maybe? Shed the unnecessary pounds, find a way to slip back inside a double handled jar, put a lid on it, sleep. Tell them all to make their own way for once, that I am done guiding or being blamed for every bad decision that was ever made.
write a poem in the form of a “to-do list.”
NaPoWriMo 2021 – Day 9 Prompt
I love a “to-do” list. I have them at work every day, and outside of work I jot down little lists of things I want to achieve with my free time or important tasks that must not be forgotten. My own list for today looks a little like this:
Write NaPoWriMo Day Nine Post (Done!)
Deal with house stuff. (Done!)
Submit rejected short story to the journal suggested by the editor of the journal that rejected it.
Submit a poem (or poems) to Spelt.
Compile submission document for Interpreter’s House.
Make a list of submission calls for the rest of April.
Write 1,000 words for NaNoWriMo
I always find that if I get the first couple of things ticked off first thing, I’ve got the momentum to get the rest of the list done. If I leave it all to the last hour of the day, nothing will be achieved and I’ll just file the list away with the rest of the good-intentions that never saw the light of day. Have any of you got “to-do list” tips for an expert procrastinator?
I like to imagine someone finding me. Perhaps stripping up floorboards on a Sunday and finding my femur cocooned in the hidden vestments of a priest also long dead, and buried.
Somewhere out there I have ten fingers, ten toes, and twenty-four knobbled bits of spine that have been turned over, kissed, caressed, worshipped more thoroughly than I think I ever was in life.
Funny thing isn’t it, the idea of relics, when with each breath, what dark deeds I slipped into the hidden hours! When no one else was waking or watching and I could move freely, like a wraith.
They built a reliquary around my skull, but gave it another man’s name and called me saint. Then the King’s men came, beat the bone until the alter glittered with dust and there was one less piece of me.
I like to imagine someone finding me, the slow horror on their faces at the bone clack of de-fleshed limbs shifting, their trembling hands lifting cloth to find that I’m still here.
I’m mixing prompts again today. Day Eight for NaPoWriMo was the challenge to “write your own poem in the form of a monologue delivered by someone who is dead.” I mulled this challenge over for a while, and this morning I thought of the perfect way to merge it with last night’s DVerse Meet The Bar challenge.
Write a poem about the body parts (e.g. eyes, hands, feet) as a metaphor and/or story. It doesn’t have to be about your body or family’s history (from the first person experience), if this makes it uncomforable for you. You can write about the body’s experience of someone else (from a third person narrative perspective). You create the mood – serious, or sad or sexy, or funny or filled with nostalgia.
Relics played a pivotal in medieval Christianity, though the validity of these relics is sometimes questionable. During the reign of Henry VIII, and the reformation, ‘Popish’ totems were destroyed and the churches stripped to bring them more in line with the developing Protestant faith in England. Many of these items were hidden away for safe keeping however, and some were brought back out during the reign of Mary I. Some were lost forever. My thought was this, how would someone feel about their body being dug up and distributed across a country, perhaps a continent, under the claim that the bones belonged to a famous saint?
Dark mouths open. Hollow depths, or so it appears until a scream finally sounds.
Before my husband and I started dating, I wrote a fib for him a thank-you gift for fixing my laptop. It was NaPoWriMo that introduced me to the form, and he’d never received a poem as a gift before so he found it quite novel. Now I’m not saying poetry is the basis of my marriage, but sometimes a little fib can go a long way.
Carol J Forrester 
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