Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo

Found (For NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 4)

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The prompt today was to write a triolet. A triolet is an eight-line poem. All the lines are in iambic tetrameter (for a total of eight syllables per line), and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines. This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet. Beyond this, there is a tight rhyme scheme (helped along by the repetition of lines) ABaAabAB. Actually, there was a triolet challenge that I wrote for twice before for NaPoWriMo, once exactly ten years ago in 2013, the first year I did NaPoWriMo, and again in 2020. The poems as well as the cats  I  eventually “found”  back then are below:

A Poem a Minute with a Triolet In it

When first I tried to write this rhyme
I could not seem to make it scan.
In short, I felt less than sublime
when first I tried to write this rhyme;
but then I took the proper time
and proved the truth as other than:
“When first I tried to write this rhyme
I could not seem to make it scan.”

 

With Workmen Here

The cats have flown, I know not where.
They’ve chosen to remain aloof.
They don’t await me on the stair.
The cats have flown, I know not where.
Not one to steal my favorite chair.
I do not hear them on the roof.
The cats have flown, I know not where.
They’ve chosen to remain aloof.

 

The assignment for day four of NaPoWriMo 2023 is to write a triolet.

Time Temporal, for NaPoWriMo Day 3, 2023

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Time Temporal

                  by Judy Dykstra-Brown

Shall I contrast thee to a winter’s night?
Thou art less lovely and more tempestuous.
The lack of wind doth still November’s empty stalks,
Oe’r which the winter hath too long a power.
Sometimes the too-cold moon hides ‘neath the clouds.
Then rarely doth it’s pitted face shine forth;
And dark from dark can sometimes rise,
Spurred on by fate or providence’s static plan.
But thy short winter shall soon pass away,
Restore to thee the homeliness of death.
Nor shall that birth that brought you forth to light
Still claim thee when temporal time shall stop thy growth.
As men lose breath and eyes lose sight,
So dies this poem, and draws thee with it to thy grave.

Sonnet 18

            by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

For NaPoWriMo  Day 3, they wanted us to write an “Opposite Poem” based on a famous poem. Mine is above.

NaPoWriMo Day 2, 2023. After and Before

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 After and Before

Rush hour traffic for raindrops.
The universe’s roar of disapproval.
That last guest left at a party who doesn’t realize the party is over.
Words that called out for company.
A bird searching for an answer.
A small pond that has died and gone to heaven
A single kernel.  
A small scuffle.
A man with limited vision.
 A relationship that barely passes for love.
Fate coinciding with a wish.
A storeroom for rain.

 

For NaPoWriMo 2023 Today’s prompt asks you to:

*pick 5-10 words from the following list :
owl generator fog river clove miracle cyclops oyster mercurial seaweed gutter artillery salt elusive thunder ghost acorn cheese longing cowbird truffle quahog song

*then to write out a question for each word selected and for each question, to write a one-line answer.

What is a river? Rush hour traffic for raindrops.
What is thunder?  The universe’s roar of disapproval.
What is a ghost? That last guest left at a party who doesn’t realize the party is over.
What is a song? Words that called out for company.
What is an owl?  A bird searching for an answer.
What is fog? A small pond that has died and gone to heaven.
What is a cyclops? A man with limited vision.
What is a miracle? Fate coinciding with a wish.
What is a gutter?  A storeroom for rain.
What is a truffle?  A small scuffle.
What is  acorn? A single kernel.  (A group of corns is called an ear.)
What is longing? Precognitive achievement.
What is artillery? Digging in an attempt to find buried Pre-Columbian statues.
What is a quahog? A new breed of hybrid animal half duck and half pig.
What is an oyster? A Jewish Grandpa.
What is clove? A relationship that barely passes for love.
What is mercurial? A doctor who specializes in treating the maladies of mythological sea beings.

*After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.

Foggybaby Dreams

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Foggybaby Dreams Clarified
(For My Nephews––now Six Feet Tall.)

You flinched from my touch,
hated the red cowboy hats
I bought for you,
preferred the hundred
tiny grass frogs
to the cows we tried
to introduce
into your city lives,
had eyes only for the trucks
carrying salt for the cows
to gather after.

Early mornings,
you leaned against
my sleep.
And oh,
your sleep-wicked
hair
and your
sweet sour milkbreath
and the
slight fart smell
of your warm bunny p.j.’s,
your impeccable smiles.
Daylight
had barely
bedeviled
you yet.

Five minutes until
you melted
back into your
foggy baby dreams,
and I became
your
nostalgia.

For NaPoWriMo 2023, the first prompt is to write a poem inspired by a book cover.
Below is information for the book cover that seemed to best illustrate this poem:

And also for dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

Found Poetry for NaPoWriMo 2022, Day 30

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The prompt for the 30th day of NaPoWriMo 2022 was to write a cento–a poem made up from the lines of other poets. In my poem above, the lines are numbered. The sources are given below:

I listed Hilda Morley as a 4 in two places  in my poem because although both lines were from the same poem,  they were not sequential, but were in different parts of  her poem.

Family Links, for NaPoWriMo 2022, Day 29

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Sturdy Dutch stock,
Grandma Dykstra
Grandma and brother
Mother with her sisters. She’s lower left.
Dad and cousins, his mother, her sister Susie and my oldest sister, Betty Jo. This must have been taken around 1940
Dad duded up
1949
Mother
Family Christmas–Grandma, Dad and me.
Thanks, Mom, for all of those early rhyming sessions
Mom and Dad, 1970
Mom and Dad in Australia. He finally got to travel–to come visit me.
With Mom and sisters, at my wedding.

Family Links

These are the gifts I was given at birth:
my father’s high cheekbones, my auntie’s wide girth.
Legs that are solid and a brain that is sound,
a head that’s too big and a stomach too round.

From my mother, a funny bone and a fine wit
in sharing my life by writing of it.
A talent for rhyme and a need to be telling
stories original, tight and compelling.

A thirst for travel, squelched in my dad,
allowed me adventures he rarely had.
A love of babies and a wicked humor
that didn’t go wasted in this baby boomer.

I’m forever grateful that I came to be,
thanks to those genes that created me.
With both foibles and talents, I’m not perfect for sure,
but all that I am, I have come to endure.

I’ve lived to an age where I appreciate
all of the gifts that I’ve come to relate.
 Here I am, the next link in the family queue,
and what they shared with me, I now share with you.

 

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is “to write a poem in which you muse on the gifts you received at birth.”

NaPoWriMo 2022, Day 28 Concrete Poetry

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Set in Concrete

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Screen Shot 2016-06-21 at 9.30.59 AM

For NaPoWriMo

Building Joy in the World, for NaPoWriMo 2022, Day 27 and Prompts

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Building Joy in the World

If I forgo mere toil and strife
for a more playful sort of life,

and live this playful sort of life
to the accompaniment of fife,

of fife and whistle, flute and drum,
my narrow life might expand some.

Expand from shard to full-blown bowl,
filled to its edges with more soul

’til edges of my soul have filled
the bowl from which it now has spilled.

Spilled out to change the world it touches,
wrested from my lonely clutches.

Freed from their clutch, to build a life
that has transcended mere toil and strife

Prompt words today are narrow, forgo, playful, shard and touch. This poem is also written to fulfill the NaPoWriMo2022  day 27 prompt to write a “Duplex”—a 14 line poem of seven two-line stanzas where the second line of the first stanza is echoed by (but not identical to) the first line of the second stanza, the second line of the second stanza is echoed by (but not identical to) the first line of the third stanza, and so on. Then the last line should be the same as the first line of the poem. Image by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash.

On the Subject of Similes vs. Metaphors: NaPoWriMo 2022, Day 26

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Advice to a Poetry Critic

Each poet worth her salt adores
well-appointed metaphors,
but when they step up to the mike,
similes they only like.
Before you discuss simile
consult an expert vis a vis
the difference between the two
so you will never have to rue
mislabeling your imagery.
Hyperbole is not allusion,
so don’t add to the confusion.
Synecdoche to oxymoron––
as you choose what to write more on––
get their names right for your reader.
There’s more to poems than rhyme and meter!

This is a rerun from a few year ago, but couldn’t resist using it for NaPoWriMo.

Mother Mexico: NaPoWriMo 2022, Day 25

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Mother Mexico

We cannot lock our doors to dreams. They enter where they will
and we cannot put them out when we have had our fill.
They wander through the rooms of us, half part of us, half ghosts
who all night long make use of us as their compliant hosts.

The one whose skirts are widest, who fills the most of me,
is a vibrant lady who stretches sea to sea.
She brings her music with her, caught up in her hair.
Auras of mariachi swirl around her in the air.

Paint oozes from her fingertips and ornaments the wall,
creating lovely murals depicting nearly all
of what she has to offer: the castillos and fiestas,
empanadas, handicrafts, salsa and siestas.

Chihuahuas yap about her heels. Vaqueros follow after.
Pinatas and serapes are hung from every rafter.
Her history trails behind her—subjugation, revolution.
Every wave of conquerors offering absolution

for what came before it—wave after wave of those
with sacrificial knives or guns and armor worn as clothes.
Mayan, Aztec, Spaniards, French, Americans  all seeking
gold or land or slaves or a sacrifice that’s leaking

out behind her in a trail of footsteps made of blood
pooling into earth beneath everywhere she stood.
Chiles, corn and amaranth flavor all the food
that she provides with plenty to feed her hungry brood.

The dreamer sups with all the rest, slipping away at last
when the morning beams of sun over the bed are cast.
Then she awakes to a world that dreams can only echo—
the coatimundi, fighting cock, the donkey and the gekko.

Creatures, food and music catch her in their grasp
and before she can struggle or even scream or gasp,
she’s held in the real world, imprisoned in the beam
of what through the whole long night she’d thought to be a dream.

 

For NaPoWriMo  we are to write an aisling, a poetic form that developed in Ireland. An aisling recounts a dream or vision featuring a woman who represents the land or country on/in which the poet lives, and who speaks to the poet about it. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts a dream or vision, and in which a woman appears who represents or reflects the area in which you live.