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.
Tag / napowrimo
#NaPoWriMo – Day Nine – Fate Speaks
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?
Share this:
#NaPoWriMo – Day Eight – Return To The Spoon River
Dead Man Of Many Names
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.
https://dversepoets.com/2021/04/08/mtb-the-body-poetry/
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?
Share this:
#NaPoWriMo – Day Seven – Hollow Depths
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.
Share this:
#NaPoWriMo 2021 – Day Six – Grave Hold
They fill her grave up with hindsight.
Shift the weight of blame
to keep her bones in the mud,
her soul buried under reasoning,
as if the stake wasn’t enough
they must reform her a monster.
Imagine her rising
half clothed in skin,
ribcage a broken casket
heart still guttering
not all the way extinguished.
That way her howling can be dismissed
as nothing more than yes, yes, yes.
Who missed a day of NaPoWriMo, not me that’s for sure. The Day Six prompt was “Go to a book you love. Find a short line that strikes you. Make that line the title of your poem. Write a poem inspired by the line. Then, after you’ve finished, change the title completely.”
I decided to follow on from Day Five, and chose the last line from the Fiona Benson poem that inspired me, “The woman is blamed” (from [Not Zeus: Medusa I] – ‘Vertigo and Ghosts’).
Carol J Forrester 
You must be logged in to post a comment.