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.
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’).
[not-Guilty: A Witch I]
Pleaded innocent for hours,
reading as guilty
when she protested
in that shrieking, crackle voice
and choked on
communion wine prayers
with her mouth full
of spells.
It does people some good
roping up witches,
purging
evil from the world
the woman is blamed.
I’m mixing two prompts this evening. NaPoWriMo’s Day Five challenge to mirror the layout and of an existing poem that I admire, (I chose a Fiona Benson poem from her collection ‘Vertigo & Ghosts’) and the DVersePoets Quardrille prompt: wine. During the 17th century there were a number of ‘tests’ to prove the innocence or guilt of a person accused of witchcraft. One of those ‘tests’ was to offer them communion or to have them recite the Lord’s Prayer. If they choked, of stumbled over the words then it was proof of their guilt. Fiona Benson’s poem [not-Zeus:Medusa I] ends on the line “the woman is blamed” which I’ve kept the same, but I’ve not followed the syllable count exactly.
At some point in the empty hours of a night,
the motorway tarmac softens into a sea,
allowing broken ships to slip upwards
their ghost ragged rigging thick and slack with mist
yet sailing steadily beneath these walkways,
beneath these sleeping midnight travellers,
watching through the steam of their coffees
not so much as blinking while spectres leap
from mast to mast,
all colours bleached down to canvas
and a single bone white skulls screaming
at the heart of every flag.
I’ve not posted a response to the Day Three prompt as I’m still working on my deck of words. I decided to use Caroline Taggart’s book ‘500 Beautiful Words You Should Know’ as inspiration for my deck so I’ve only got around 20-odd words picked out at the moment. I still wrote a poem yesterday as I took part in the Weekend Writing Prompt, so I’m still on track for 30 poems in 30 days.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem inspired by one of the images from the Space Liminal Bot twitter account. After a bit of scrolling I came across the image above and it sparked the idea for today’s poem.
After the heat passed out of our veins
and cold sucked all energy
right through the soles of our feet
to the same place shadows reached to.
When your voice seemed to linger,
half calling,
your smile flickering in my periphery.
That was when I turned my head,
slow and deliberate,
lips caught around words
I’d wished I’d said to you.
Carol J Forrester 
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