Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo 2019

The Year I Gave Up Childish Things: NaPoWriMo Day 9, Apr 9, 2019

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The Year I Gave Up Childish Things

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The Year I Gave Up Childish Things

At the age of sixty-eight,
I’ve no wish to equivocate.
Is there a time when childhood ends?
When we give up playful friends?
Cease to lie in grass and dream?
Drink our coffee without cream?
Always do what’s reasonable
in order to avoid life’s trouble?
Say no to candy and dessert?
Cease to giggle, joke and flirt?
If so, I can’t remember mine.
Perhaps when I am sixty-nine!

The NaPoWrMo prompt is to construct a poem of “things.”

Hop Scotch: NaPoWriMo 2019, Day 7

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As usual, when I showed Forgottenman this little house I made for Yolanda’s daughter, Yoli, he insisted there must be a poem in it. Since this day’s prompt is about gifts, it seemed preordained. This is the little house fashioned by a man from clay as we sat eating our lunch in Tlaquepaque and listening to mariachi music. They were for the taking for a tip, so I chose one, brought it home and painted it. I had to add a few people and animals and flowers just to make it happier for Yoli, who always makes me happy.

Hop Scotch

Everyone should have a child around
now and then
to shake out the wrinkles
and lighten up the predictable.

That lighthearted humming on the patio,
tuneless and joyful?
That Barbie doll world
set up for the hour or so

before she goes
tripping off
to find tennis balls
in the garden with the dog?

Someone else’s child.
What gift could she treasure as much
as I have treasured this last hour’s
spontaneous distraction ?

One shoe
under the terrace table.
One cookie vanished off the plate.
One giggle listened for. 

 

NaPoWriMo prompt: Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem of gifts and joy. What would you give yourself, if you could have anything? What would you give someone else?

If

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If

 

 

Prompt words today are coast, natural, aghast and venturesome. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/06/rdp-saturday-coast/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/04/06/fowc-with-fandango-natural/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/04/06/your-daily-word-prompt-aghast-april-6-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/04/06/venturesome-2/

The NaPoWriMo post is: Today, write a poem that emphasizes the power of “if,” of the woulds and coulds and shoulds of the world.

The Cure: NaPoWriMo 2019, Day 5

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Heart 3


The Cure

That sadness in your heart?
You told me once that she had
kissed it all away.

But still I could detect,
once she was gone, the echo of
that sadness in your heart.

We took your sad past to the ocean
where I hoped the waves had
kissed it all away.

Yet, like a bitter tide, it returned
and I could see again
that sadness in your heart.

I took your sad past to the mountain,
where once again I hoped the wind and sun had
kissed it all away,

and when, on our descent,
I feared the reappearance of
that sadness in your heart? I
kissed it all away.

 

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write a villanelle that contained at least two of three other components.  Here is the vital information concerning that prompt:

the villanelle. The classic villanelle has five three-line stanzas followed by a final, four-line stanza. The first and third lines of the first stanza alternately repeat as the last lines of the following three-line stanzas, before being used as the last two lines of the final quatrain. And to make it an even more virtuoso performance, Dargan’s alternating lines, besides being taken from songs, express “opposing” ideas, with one being about sleeping, and the other waking.

Following Dargan’s lead, today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates at least one of the following: (1) the villanelle form, (2) lines taken from an outside text, and/or (3) phrases that oppose each other in some way. If you can use two elements, great – and if you can do all three, wow! (I did all three. The opposing line “There’s a sadness in my heart” is the title of a song recorded by Legs and “kissed it all away” is a song title from the album “The Distance Between Two Truths” recorded by Mark Sholtez.)

Rewind

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Rewind

Cast-off loves better unmet,
daredevil acts you’d best forget—
so many choices in your past
that people said would never last
Prescient in part, their words are sage.
It’s true that you have turned the page
on all the foolishness of youth,
and yet, it must be said in truth
that memories of all that’s past
will last and last and last and last.

You’ll play them over in the dark,
your mind the screen, as you embark
upon that nightly rerun of
each painful unrequited love.
Foolish decisions you once made
reemerge in dream’s charade.
All mixed together, puzzling, dense—
a mire that defies good sense.
Until there, in your deepest being,
you’ll find the truth of what you’re seeing.

 

Prompt words for today are cast-off or cast off, prescient and daredevil. And, for NaPoWriMo: write your own sad poem, but one that, like Teicher’s, achieves sadness through simplicity.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/04/rdp-thursday-cast-off-cast-off/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/04/04/fowc-with-fandango-prescient/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/04/04/daredevil/

 

Little Sins: NaPoWriMo 2019 Day 3 Plus Multiple Prompts

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Little Sins

Lynnie Brost and I, washing our sins away in the bathtub
and singing of it to the strains of holy music
from The Back to the Bible Broadcast
on the radio in the living room.

My older sisters stretched out on the porch
reading Photoplay and giggling
at our penitent antics,
feeling no need
to confess the sins
of Vivian dances
and the back seats of cars.

At the age of five,
How could we articulate our sins?
The tiny plastic sword—a wingless caduceus
I’d filched from a junk drawer where hundreds resided,
rewards for the cancer drive her mother supervised.
My mother head of the Sister Kenny Polio
drive, where rewards were merely
of the conscience.
How I had wanted
one of those
tiny swords.
Why

had I not just asked for one?

We
worried most
back in our innocence—
back when our sins were the least.
Back when in our minds, the value of what we wanted
was linked as much to how much we wanted it
as to its material value.

That two-penny sucker taken from the open jar
in the Peck family’s remodeled basement.
My mother asked where I’d gotten it.
My ashamed confession,
that long trip
next door
to
confess again.
No problem. That’s what they were there for.

But my mother,
knowing the power of the little sin,
was teaching me the dangers
of its contact.

What could it hurt,
sugar packets pocketed at Starbucks,
extra ketchup and mustard scooped by handfuls into purses?
Little sins overshadowed by the big sins of this world
and yet, somehow, shameful in their pettiness.
Drenched in these small sins,
what contracts do we,
unknowing,
make?

To steal from the rich and give to the poor,
then display our generosity on our lapels
by the scarlet badge of the caduceus?
Noble Robin Hoods, we justify
by our assurance that
they’ve stolen
from us
as
well.
and thus,
those who need most to learn
become instead our teachers,
educating us that their own sins are justified—
what we ourselves would do
if only we had
their power.

Prompt words today are articulate, contacts, drench and penitent.

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem that “involves a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable length of time, focusing on imagery, sound or emotional content.”
Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/rdp-wednesday-articulate/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/04/03/fowc-with-fandango-contacts/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/penitent/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/your-daily-word-prompt-drench-april-3-2019/

 

 

 

 

 

Why Me? NaPoWriMo 2019 Day 2

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Why Me?

Today I have the doldrums. My smile is upside down.
I cannot go to meet my cronies in the town.
My misery is absolute, I’m coughing and I’m sneezing,
and all this blowing of the nose is definitely unpleasing.

My bones could use some stretching, but I fear this will not be,
and Sandy, Harriet and Glen today I will not see.
I’ll try to talk to Gloria on the telephone
explaining why it’s best today that I am alone.

Why in fifteen minutes, as they shoot the  breeze.
will I be forced to lie abed, to blow my nose and sneeze?
Almond croissants and coffee and congeniality
are theirs while I am sentenced to echinacea tea!

The world just isn’t fair, my friend. I’m such a sorrowful wretch.
The only pleasure left in life to lie here and to kvetch!
It is life’s  idiosyncrasy that nine times out of ten
when I most want to paint the town, instead I must stay in.

What master of the universe sees that such a function
turns out to be a flop as a method of conjunction
with busy friends  that for two months I haven’t seen together
and in the one time we can meet, keeps me on such short tether?

 

The prompt words today are stretch, idiosyncrasy, absolute and upside. In addition, the NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to write a poem that ends in a question. Here are links to all:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/rdp-tuesday-stretch/
FOWC with Fandango — Idiosyncrasy
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/your-daily-word-prompt-absolute-april-2-
2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/upside/
NaPoWriMo