All posts tagged: nationalpoetrymonth

NaPoWriMo Day Twenty-Eight

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So, a backwards story is the prompt for today. A little strange, but let’s see what we can do with it. A Change In Season That was when the thaw came. Fingers blue and black against the ice, blood can freeze if you get it cold enough, still just enough life to shiver, teeth like tic-tacs rattling in a box, the pin pricks of goosebumps, one cool breeze to lift tiny hairs, a chill along the spine, clothes in a pile on the sand legs bare to the winter sun, footsteps towards the waves. The sea takes bites out of the cliff-face each night.

NaPoWriMo Day Two

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Today’s prompt for NaPoWriMo is to write a family-portrait poem. To be honest I wasn’t entirely sure what to write for this one. I’ve written about numerous family members before, my mother in ‘Your Sheep‘, my sister in ‘Jo’, my Great Gran in ‘Ba‘ and the women of my family as a whole in ‘The Women I Came From‘. Both my Grandfathers have poems about them, the one actually has two! The second poem ‘Rock’n’Roll‘ was more about him and my Grandmother watching their family grow up however. All in all my family has played a pretty massive part in inspiring my writing so today’s prompt is more than a little tricky. What is left to say that you as a reader won’t find in another one of my poems?   This Family It’s the sort of family where everyone in Shropshire is a cousin of some kind. Introductions become a test of how many links it takes to skip from you to them and who in between you both know. With Dad it’s a …

National Poetry Day – A Poem Called Confusion

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On the 8th October it will be National Poetry Day here in Merry’O’England. To celebrate this I thought I’d track back through my old poems and bring out the very first ones that I published here on Writing and Works and see how they fit in with life today.This was brought about by discussing with a fellow blogger the troubles of improving as a writer and looking back on previous work that you realise wasn’t as good as you thought it was. Over the last three years a lot of my priorities have changed and it seemed apt that in a month where we will be celebrating poetry, I should try my hand at responding to some of my own poems from back before University. Feel free to try it yourself and link back in the comments section below. How has your image as a writer grown in the last three/four/five years? March 2012: Confusion It’s weird. But I feel… If I write it down Then maybe… Maybe… It will be more real. Because you! You’re …

My Grandfather

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‘One of the old men fearing no man’ Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton by John Drinkwater My Grandfather no longer ages. In photos from family gatherings he stands taller than the rest of us our constant invariable. Despite broken ribs, eleven, smashed sternum, destroyed spleen, punctured lung, fracture wrist, cardiac arrest not once but twice! Despite the bull’s best efforts, our urges to lessen the workload, relax, take time, watch the races and leave the farming- An old farmer never retires. He doubles the size of the vegetable patch, rebuilds fences, two new stables, buys a flock of ewes (in lamb) (and claims they’ll lamb themselves… we all know they will not lamb themselves.) To him, technology was foreign, but, to prove the family wrong he bought a laptop. And taught himself to use it in six months. (Though email still proves elusive And the last text he sent me was blank. Still. My Grandfather is the same as the man in my memories, And even at my most feminist I did not mind to be …