NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Fear Full - Rewrite of "Cave Dwellers"

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/10/25 - Day 10 of 30

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NaPoWriMo Prompt

Now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Yesterday, we looked at a poem that used sound in a very particular way, to create a slow and mysterious feeling. Mark Bibbins’ poem, “At the End of the Endless Decade,” uses sound very differently, with less eerieness and more wordplay. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like Bibbins’, uses alliteration and punning. See if you can’t work in references to at least one word you have trouble spelling, and one that you’ve never quite been able to perfectly remember the meaning of.


My Poem

Cave Dwellers

(Original Poem)

Clunking spelunkers descend

Through cooling guano they wend.

From the limestone vault depend

Armies of bats, chittering rats,

Rabid cave denizens.

Horned millipedes meander

Thirsty mosquitoes muster

Harried scorpions posture. 

Critters and creatures and ghastly creepers

Patient Black Widows tether and spin.

Indefatigable fauna

Fecundity found far underground

Undeniably NOT

My cup of tea!

Fear Full

(Rewritten In Free Verse Form With “Emotional Show-Don’t-Tell”)

Exploring a cave would crush my crushing fear of creepy crawlies.

I’d free myself from frantic fits of itching panic

With exposure to all those scaly, hairy legs and beady eyes at once.

Can you imagine?

Who’d see vaulted bats as flying, squeaking, sonar-seeking eco-buddies?

Flea-furred, blood-sucking vermin, ready to strike like Dracula at night.

Are scorpions beneficent because they control insect populations?

Angular alien designs waving tail stingers like black flags of death.

How can they let millipedes meander across bare skin on a million tiny tip-toes?
Unholy armored earthworms with peril dripping from poisonous spiky termini.

And why are rats kept as pets like cuddly, miniature pink-eyed cats?

Overrunning oily fur-bags, fangs crowding in, like injectors of rabies and plague.

Why don’t you go on ahead?

I’m trapped by indecision.

Is speluncaphobia worse than entomophobia?

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: How To Write a Love Song

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/21/25 - Day 21 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now here’s our daily (optional) prompt. Sawako Nakayasu’s poem “Improvisational Score” is a rather surreal prose poem describing an imaginary musical piece that proceeds in a very unmusical way. Today, try your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.


My Poem

How To Write a Love Song

Leap from a plane, gut clenched, heart in your mouth,

A shrieking Peregrine nosedive. Do you want to keep falling?

Would you live in that wild freedom forever?

When you land, pack that chute and set down that ride in verse.

Travel to exotic lands, like Polo for his Khan,

Discover the beautiful mysteries of far flung locales,

Will you see peasant pleasures and royal riches?

When you return, map your journey in a sacred journal.

Rescue an abandoned puppy and pledge yourself to their care.

Feed and befriend, fail and forgive, and love with all your being.

Will your furry forever challenge your melting heart?

When the last breath flows from their sloppy, happy face, write.

Let your guts twist on the spike of first-time betrayal.

Before that split second, was your entire life blissful ignorance?

From that point forward, will there be a thorn in your heart?

When you stop crying, capture that bilious ochre dawn in searing words.

Prick your thumb. See that you bleed.

Let your heart explode and let someone patch it up.

Mend your fences.

Be afraid and do it anyway.

Capture those vignettes.

That’s how to write a love song.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Safer Harbor

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/20/25 - Day 20 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Below, you’ll find Theodore Roethke’s poem, “In Evening Air.”


In Evening Air

1

A dark theme keeps me here,
Though summer blazes in the vireo’s eye.
Who would be half possessed
By his own nakedness?
Waking’s my care–
I’ll make a broken music, or I’ll die.

2

Ye littles, lie more close!
Make me, O Lord, a last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.
Once I transcended time:
A bud broke to a rose,
And I rose from a last diminishing.

3

I look down the far light
And I behold the dark side of a tree
Far down a billowing plain,
And when I look again,
It’s lost upon the night–
Night I embrace, a dear proximity.

4

I stand by a low fire
Counting the wisps of flame, and I watch how
Light shifts upon the wall.
I bid stillness be still.
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.


So, let’s face it: this poem is weird. The rhythm is odd, the rhymes are too, and the language is strangely prophetic and not at all “conversational.” Despite – or maybe because – of this, it has a hypnotic quality, as if it were all inevitable. Your challenge is, with this poem in mind, to write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration). One way to approach this is to think of a song you know and then basically write new lyrics that fit the original song’s rhythm/phrasing.

My Poem

Inspirational Song: "Colder weather" - Zac Brown Band

Safer Harbor

You gave plenty of yourself to reign my heart in.

Gave up your freedom in a time of bold religion.

I never had a chance to plant flowers in the garden

Of withered aspirations making you a gilded cage.

Your heart is finally beating again.

After many seasons later.

When you proclaim that we’ll get better

I sense your hesitance.

My heart is a broken bird,

Grounded by your subterfuge.

I’m flightless with no way to gauge

Migration to safe harbor.

So we dance a circle withering in silence.

Your touch is cruel as the promise of red violence.

And with my castigations falling on a cold, deaf mistress.

I pray for succor solely through your expurgated coyness.

Your heart is finally beating again.

After many seasons later.

When you proclaim that we’ll get better

I sense your hesitance.

My heart is a broken bird,

Grounded by your subterfuge.

I’m flightless with no way to gauge

Migration to safe harbor.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Misophonic Misery

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/19/25 - Day 19 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt



And now for our daily prompt – optional as always. This one is inspired by Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song.”

The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek for “goat song.” The song in Kelly’s poem is quite literally a goat song. The poem also describes a tragedy, both in the modern sense of an awful event, and the ancient dramatic sense of a play in which someone does something terrible, and the play’s action shows the consequences.

The poem has a timeless, could-have-happened-anywhere/anywhen quality that I associate with blues and folk ballads – including murder ballads (a subgenre of song dealing with a gruesome crime, first arising from broadsheet ballads sold at English executions, and which later came to America in forms like “The Knoxville Girl” and then morphed their way into country music).

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad. One way into this prompt may be to use it to retell a family tragedy or story, or to retell a crime or tragic event that occurred in your hometown.


My Poem

Misophonic Misery

Her numerous mouth noises were never her fault.

Mashed potatoes were mush in a sausage grinder.

Corn kernels were the typebar strikes of an off-track platen.

Every swallow of milk was the chugging glugging of a nomad at an oasis.

I despised her sheer audacity at making us so uncomfortable, so embarrassed.

Almost five decades later, I sit lost in numerous regrets.

Hoping whoever took my sister released her unharmed and well.

Her mouth-breathing, lip-smacking, throat-clearing tics

By now may be driving a significant other to their limit.

I’d give my all to be in her misophonic thrall again.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: May I One Day Lie Beside Her Again - Rewrite of "May I One Day Lie Beside You Again"

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/08/25 - Day 8 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

Now try writing your own ghazal that takes the form of a love song – however you want to define that. Observe the conventions of the repeated word, including your own name (or a reference to yourself) and having the stanzas present independent thoughts along a single theme – a meditation, not a story.


My Poem

May I One Day Lie Beside You Again

(Original Poem)

My moonbeam Aphrodite, Cygnus kindly attend. 

All who usher love, my beauty closely attend. 

Would this heavenly creature to me descend.

Her blossoming heart I would gladly attend. 

Glorious operas to your beauty are penned 

Whose arias the world would rapturously attend. 

Your grace and beauty will have no end. 

Your celestial sublimity I gladly attend. 

To hold you again this Mark will soon transcend.

Until then your earthen bedside will he attend.

May I One Day Lie Beside Her Again

(Rewritten In Free Verse Form With “Emotional Show-Don’t-Tell”)

Vibrant beauty snuffed, a candle in the wind.

My moonbeam Aphrodite here and gone much too soon

And I am left to lie atop her earthen bed.

I thrash and moan and rend the soil into my clothes

Beseeching with a broken heart and wounded soul

For Cygnus of the stars to cherish and protect my love.

Celebrate her homecoming. Keep her safe until I’m found.

I am helpless, hopeless, tiny in a storm-tossed sea,

A vast, interminable, unknowable wait for rescue lies forever ahead.

And wait I shall, and wait I must

For hope is the morsels of food, the drops of water,

The only lifeblood this lonesome man will have to survive.

Until he is home again.