Hello! I haven’t posted in a long time, and I apologize. College has been keeping me busy! But I am doing National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) again this year — and this time in April!
What does that mean? It means that I am writing a poem a day for 30 days throughout the month of April. It means I have to write, I have write more or less consistently, and I have train myself to look at the world around me as a poem waiting for ink.
These first several days have been hard. Not hard because I don’t like words or poetry, but hard just because time is a real factor in productivity. I’ve written some stuff I like, and some stuff that is just about how hard it is to write poems when I’m tired.
But I wanted to share a few of my poems from my first week with you — not because they’re all wonderful (I am very intentionally excluding a few 😉 ), but because I want to share some of my joy in word-smithing with you, and because I really want to know what you think!
//day 1// feeling inspired by the first day of NaPoWriMo
I want to write of bards and kings,
To tell the tales a poet sings,
To spill black ink in colors bright,
To spew forth stars into the night.
My heart could find its sun-splashed sea
And dance in telling what could be.
My window shows me other truth,
And bare brown branches wave as proof
That something that should be is not.
That ink I spill, my tears will blot.
I try to tell my tales of glory
And find they cannot hold the story.
The things I weave can’t tell all told;
My fingers cannot hold the world
I can’t make sense of all I see,
Caught in the tale surrounding me.
But what if all there is to show
Isn’t all there is to know,
And only an eternal mind
Can tell the tale I yearn to find?
//day 3// a less-inspired verse
someday I will write a poem
before the dark
decrees my bedtime.
//day 4// looking at the stars outside my window
A star is a promise.
It always was,
it always is
it always will be —
– to mark seasons,
– to mark promises,
– to mark generations,
– to mark the king,
– to mark the sunrise,
that will come.
And so we do not watch
– for nothing.
We do not hope in black.
Our very darkness is plotted with points.
Our chart of the heavens
is studded with signs
of the promise
of morning.
//day 6// written on a wuthering night
Wind rushes past my window,
Itself a living thing,
An entity I cannot catch
Or hold its soaring wing.
My fingers cannot get a grip
Or tell from where it came;
It’s mystery and majesty —
It’s glory — is my shame.
What kind of poetry do you like to read — long, short, free verse, rhyming? Are you doing NaPoWriMo? Tell me!
Highlands of Halaran 