This is the challenge set by National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo).
There are some to finish, and some I won’t do, but lets see how it goes.
Day 1 Prompt – Poem where your persona is a verb
The Holder
I am the holder
I hold everything together
I am the fixer
I hold us
I held our children
I held the jobs
I held the door fast against the wolves.
When you were broken
I held back tears and carried us
To a safe place
And let you rest and mend
When you broke me
I held you, still.
I am the holder
We are both broken
And I
I – am — losing —my —- grip.
Day 2 Haibun (not in the prompt, just how it turned out)
There’s a room above a pub. (Memoirs from an upstairs room)
There’s a room above a pub with a bed. The mattress is sunk in the middle. The dark red counterpane hangs over the edges, the frayed fringes drawing the eye down to the bare floorboards. The rug has gone. A dull light shines through the rain spattered sash window, bare without the velvet curtains. The polished table is thick with dust now, and the lamp is missing. Lie down. The beautiful chandelier is still here. A contradiction of dangling prisms and latticed cobwebs. The familiar smell of mould and old beer is strangely erotic.
Oh! the night we had
Music from the bar downstairs
Us, here, on this bed.
3 – ten rhyming lines – still work in progress – you can’t rush these things
4
Interpreting a dream
No precipice to fall from
No hill to climb or route to choose
No trains or planes
No broken journeys
None of the tell tale strife
that spell the chaos of my waking life
A calm scene
with friendly people
And and a tall fellow
In a triby hat
Browsing trinkets in a gift shop
There was fish.
Hot steamed tasty fish
We all sat together to eat.
That was the strangest thing
Because I never eat fish
And after the fish
I left with the man in the trilby hat
And heard gossip behind the wall
From the friendly people
Who were not my friends
after all
5 and 6 were not done
7 News article
Easter News
At Easter a car was found
In someone’s garden, underground
Hidden there for fifty years
with just the grass upon it
There was mud in the boot,
but no flowers on the bonnet.
8 Prompt – Use first lines from someone else’s poem, and write your own
Lost Love
(first lines by A L Tennyson)
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all
Those are the words
Above the picture on my wall
I find it rather hard that phrase
Now, after the last few days.
A sudden fury ripped us apart
And now I’m nursing a broken heart
If he had loved, and felt the cost
The heartbreak of the love he’d lost
He’d never have written those haunting lines
The words I’ve read a hundred times
And though my wounds are slowly healing
I’m not yet devoid of feeling
For perhaps I never would have missed him
If I’d never, ever kissed him.
(written over 40 years ago)
9 Concrete poem – Poem in the shape of it’s subject.
Razor
10
Form – Hay(na)Ku
Isolation. (Based on the physics of “Energy is depleted in an isolated system”)
Life
Is harder
Than you anticipated
Love
is defeated
when you’re alone
Energy
Is depleted
When you’re isolated
Death
Always completed
On your own
(Physics Post Note – Energy does not die, it is just diluted)
11
Emotion of a flower
Grown from seeds
Like the memories in my child-mind
Furry pods
Grown into multicoloured spires
Like the memories of my teen mind
Psychedelic togs
Wild in fields along the wayside
Like the memories of the joy-ride
Nova Scotian Spring
Lupins. Flowers of happiness
The memories they bring.
12 Triolet
If all you want is to stay in bed
Stay up all night and sleep all day
Then please sleep somewhere else instead
If all you want is to stay in bed
Then I can rest my sleepy head
At night, and you can snore away
If all you want is to stay in bed
Stay up all night and sleep all day
13 Stolen
Television
It was a steal
I saw it in the sale
I had to have it
A bargain beyond belief
Now I’m hooked
I cannot look away
The TV stole my time
The bargain was a thief
14 Write a poem about a Poet who inspires you – or doesn’t!
Dark and Light (Ted Hughes)
Out of R2W group and into the night
Wondering what on earth I can write
About the subject of Dark and Light
And the poet Ted Hughes
Came straight home and into the shower
Stayed there for must have been half an hour
Clearing my head as I tried to scour
Away the poet Ted Hughes
My Happy New Year dissolved to blues, when
We once again, dissected Ted Hughes
That Morning, That Salmon, this evening, confused
And I scream, unenthused, at Ted Hughes
Maybe he wins, this sad little Tyke with his
Roots in South Yorkshire but no proper rhyme
A Laureate? What? I won’t give him time
Of my day. I am done with Ted Hughes
Out of the Dark and into the Light
I love all my new friends at Read 2 Write
But never again do I want to set sight
And never again to hear of the plight
Of that miserable poet, Ted Hughes
He’s Sh*te.