A quick snippet to go with the 30/30 prompt “ambiguous sunrise.”
Window Gazing All this waiting asking wishing yearning is exhausting. Sometimes it’s as simple as believing it’s there even without a clear view.
PAD 2021 – Day 13
Uncategorized
PAD 2021 – Day 9
I am not sure what I wrote today even qualifies as a poem, but it was a fun to write. The NaPoWriMo.net prompt called for a poem in the form of a “to-do list.” The suggestion was to make it a “to-do list” of an unusual person or character. For example, what’s on the Tooth Fairy’s to-do list? Or on the to-do list of Genghis Khan? Of a housefly? The list can be a mix of extremely boring things and wild things. For some reason, the first character I thought of was The Mothman.
Mothman’s Friday To-Dos Trim beard Do 50 sit ups Do 50 wing extensions Clean coffee pot Build bridge out of sugar cubes Knock it down File & paint claws Gather doom for later harbingering Dust bookshelves Remove thorns from feet Buy sunglasses Call Mom
PAD 2021 – Day 8
Today my poem took inspiration from the the League of Canadian Poets prompt to write a poem about what happens when you sleep, as well as today’s NaPoWriMo.net prompt modeled on the 1915 book Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. It asked for a poem in the form of a monologue delivered by someone who is dead. Not a famous person, necessarily – perhaps a remembered acquaintance from your childhood. The monologue doesn’t have to be a recounting of the person’s whole life, but could be a fictional remembering of some important moment, or statement of purpose or philosophy, with any degree of drama thrown in. I chose to write from the perspective of a cousin who contracted encephalitis from a mosquito, and died several years later, long before I was born.
Maryse Reiner To call is it sleeping sickness implies a certain serenity but I can tell you, from this side of my closed eyes, it was never true. Before all that I was praised for my black curls and round blue eyes, like a doll they’d say, never getting old enough to be noted for my keen math skills or the way I could run to the treehouse faster than my brothers and climb the ladder like a squirrel. I loved the colour yellow and the way my mother’s carrot cake tasted ¬ best on my birthday. I never had time for a real crush, or to really dream about what I’d do when I finished school, but I do know it would have been more than house and babies. I do know I would have danced, even through the reluctance and bone-ache of old age. I do know I would have gone to the lake every summer, stayed up for every sunset, shut my eyes to memorize the way the crimson and pink, the streaks of orange reflected on the water. Held the shades and shapes like a favourite painting, in my heart and behind my eyes, so I’d always have some place to go to in the dark.
PAD 2021 – Day 6
I’m not posting my poem today, but am sharing the prompt because I think it has the potential to bring interesting results. I used the NaPoWriMo.net instruction borrowed from Holly Lyn Walrath to go to a book you love. Then, 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.
PAD 2021 – Day 2
Mixing two prompts today: the first being “ambient light” and the second being a challenge to write a Robert Frost-inspired poem about a road not taken.
You Are Probably Telling This With a Sigh Imagine, if you can, a man with the deepest voice you’ve ever heard sitting at a strangely firelit table, intimate in an otherwise teeming bar, looking at you in way you will remember 23 years later, on a random Wednesday, while you’re folding a pair of your daughter’s leggings and waiting for a second pot of coffee to finish brewing. Imagine, if you had left that night, away from the strangely firelit table, and ventured into something less sure. Perhaps deeply contenting. Perhaps disastrous. Where you might sit again, 23 years later, across from a man, running your finger around the rim of a coffee cup, counter-clockwise, in some subconscious spell of time reversal. Imagine, if there were only two roads, in a calm yellow wood, and not the tangled many-paths of options, like an intricate burst of blood-vessels pulsing life to places you can’t control, but might try to, or at least hope to look all the way to the end of a shady track, beyond the protective undergrowth to see not what but who is waiting.
PAD Challenge 2020 – Recap
I decided to take stock this morning and look back at what I wrote this month. 36 poems and 7 starts (that may turn into poems at some point). I even like 4 of them! Most of the poems I’ve gone on to publish in journals or anthologies have started from seeds planted during these poem-a-day challenges.
I recently submitted a revised version of my poetry manuscript, and the majority of poems in it also started from the monthly challenges I’ve completed in previous years. I realize prompts don’t work for every writer, but they have been an amazing motivator for me, and also help me explore writing in new forms or about different topics than I’m normally drawn to.
All of this to say, even in the midst of one of the most stressful and disorienting months I’ve ever experienced, poetry has been a respite. I know it always will be.
To anyone who has read or commented on my work this month, thank you! I am grateful. I always write for myself first, but it’s encouraging to know something I’ve created and shared resonates in some small way with someone else.
Next comes editing and revising. A different kind of fun! But not until June. The words need time to age and settle a bit. First I plan to read more of the poems others have created this month, and dig in to the MANY poetry books I’ve purchased in the last several weeks. I firmly believe every day is better with poetry, but never has that seemed truer than now.
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com
PAD 2020 – Day 19
My poem today is still in process, so instead I’m posting it as a photo poem. Today I used the NaPoWriMo prompt to write a poem based on a “walking archive.” What’s that? Well, it’s when you go on a walk and gather up interesting thing – a flower, a strange piece of bark, a rock. This then becomes your “walking archive” – the physical instantiation of your walk. Because of current quarantine circumstances, I did an “around the house” item retrieval instead. My written poem will also incorporate the Poetic Asides call to include the words bump; embrace; fixture; howl; lonely; resolve.
Isolation Scavenger Hunt
PAD 2020 – Day 5
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt asked for a poem using 20 Little Poetry Projects. A daunting, but creative task, and one I’m still working on. In the meantime, I decide to do a micro poem based on the Poetic Asides prompt asking for a “moment” poem.
define this
brief, but impactful —
a moment is
but, um
it’s hard to fathom
one from the next
this month
when the moment of moment
um
keeps rolling
down
a hill
I can’t
see the
bottom
of
Photo by Chavdar Lungov on Pexels.com
NaPoWriMo – Day 22
Melding prompts again today with Poetic Asides suggestion to take the name of a plant, flower or tree and make it the title of your poem, and the NaPoWriMo.net prompt to pick something impossible from a list of statements, and then write a poem in which the impossible thing happens. The statement I picked was The stars cannot rearrange themselves in the sky. Because it’s Earth Day, I was also thinking about humanity’s propensity to shoot ourselves in our own earthbound feet.
Datura
Some things aren’t supposed to happen.
Stars aren’t supposed to rearrange themselves in the sky.
Flowers aren’t supposed to bloom at midnight.
We’re not supposed to be our own worst enemy.
Under the hood of night
Cassiopeia does yoga, corpse pose,
tries the lazy letter I on for size.
The datura opens, moonflower
swallowing the dark with her
soft white lips. Seducing
the sphinx moth with her scent.
The city’s backyard aglow
with the twinkling
oil refinery, burning 24/7.
Spotlight on
the dark side.
November PAD – Day 11
The prompt today asked for an “unlucky” poem. I started thinking about all my favourite bad luck sayings and symbols, and the poem just grew from there.
11.
My grandpa used to say “You make your own luck.” A way to get us to work hard, stand up, fly right. I believed it, too. I wasn’t going to be one of those poor, unfortunate souls Ursula sang about in The Little Mermaid. I wasn’t putting my fate in the hands of a sea witch. I push my own luck. Deal my own hand. No deck-stacking, just a girl and her poor choices. The philosophers, they can debate the finer points. Epistemic luck, moral luck, and the reasons all our mouths taste a little bit sweeter when some bitter jerk gets his just desserts. If I make my own luck, do you make yours? Is it like a four-leaf clover pie, with only so many slices to go around? If the power is in both of our hands, whose fault is it that every day together is more black cats crossing, more stumbling under ladders? So much time wasted self-reflecting in this damn broken mirror.
makes/me/so/digress 