NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Wounded Deer Karma - Rewrite

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/27/25 - Day 27 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now for today’s optional prompt. W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” takes its inspiration from a very particular painting: Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that describes a detail in a painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement.


My Poem

Inspirational Painting: The Wounded Deer - Kahlo, Frida

Wounded Deer Karma

(Original Poem)

There must be a frisson when the deer knows it’s doomed.

At first it is only startled into

Log leaps

And

Quick-turn

Bolts

As hunters’ chuckling grunts precede taut bows.

Then the first arrow pierces, a quick dagger

Strike.

Off it

Bounds in

Panic

Arrow shaft bouncing, rending quivering shoulder.meat.

Three, four, shafts, and more,

Thwick thwickthwick

Through the air.

Find lamprey-toothed purchase in flowing red hide.

With

Hammer jack

Heart thumps,

The deer stops.

Stock still

Until

Shivers course through the stag in dawning throes.

It cannot escape. It now knows karma.

Dropping in supplication to fate,

Sacred cervine majesty endures

As flensing blades

And unassailable darkness

Still the stag’s heart.

Wounded Deer Karma

(Rewrite)

Flank flutters in frisson

When the deer knows doom.

First, only startled,

Log

Leaps,

Quick-turn

Bolts,

Hunters’

Chuckling grunts precede

Taut drawn bows.

First arrow

Flung,

Quick dagger

Strike.

Deer

Bounds

Off.

Wild-eyed

Panic!

Arrow bounces, rends

Quivering shoulder meat.

Three, four, shafts, and more,

Thwick thwick-thwick

Through charged air.

Strike strike-strike,

Lampreys purchased in flowing red hide.

Hammer jack

Heart thumps,

Deer stops.

Stock still

Until

Shivers-course,

Dawn-throes,

Known karma.

No escape.

Supplicated to fate,

Sacred cervine majesty endures.

Flensing

Blade-borne

Darkness

Stills its

Pure

Stag

Heart.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Wounded Deer Karma

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/27/25 - Day 27 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now for today’s optional prompt. W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” takes its inspiration from a very particular painting: Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that describes a detail in a painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement.


My Poem

Inspirational Painting: The Wounded Deer - Kahlo, Frida

Wounded Deer Karma

There must be a frisson when the deer knows it’s doomed.

At first it is only startled into

Log leaps

And

Quick-turn

Bolts

As hunters’ chuckling grunts precede taut bows.

Then the first arrow pierces, a quick dagger

Strike.

Off it

Bounds in

Panic

Arrow shaft bouncing, rending quivering shoulder.meat.

Three, four, shafts, and more,

Thwick thwickthwick

Through the air.

Find lamprey-toothed purchase in flowing red hide.

With

Hammer jack

Heart thumps,

The deer stops.

Stock still

Until

Shivers course through the stag in dawning throes.

It cannot escape. It now knows karma.

Dropping in supplication to fate,

Sacred cervine majesty endures

As flensing blades

And unassailable darkness

Still the stag’s heart.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: The Hunger Triangle - Rewrite in Free Verse

NaPoWriMo 2025

03/31/25 - Warm-up day before Day 1

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now, here’s an early-bird prompt for those of you who want to write a poem, whether it’s April or not – and for those of you for whom it’s April already, even as poets in other places around the world are still in March.

Maybe one of the most common subjects in art is a portrait – a painting of one, singular person. Portrait poems are also very common. To get a sense of the breadth of style and form that these poems can take, take a look at Anni Liu’s prose poem, “Portrait Of,” John Yau’s, “Portrait,” and Karl Kirchwey’s “The Red Portrait.” Now try penning a portrait poem of your own. It can be a self-portrait, a portrait of someone well known to you, or even a poem inspired by an actual painted portrait. (If you’re looking for one to inspire you, why not check out the online collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery?)


My Poem

The Hunger Triangle

(Original Poem)

 

The Hunger Triangle forgotten by God 

Is Kongor, Waat, and Ayod 

Sudanese famine as rebels and pols  

Disrupt the flow of food. 

 

The boy is less than a mile away 

From food and too weak to go on. 

The vulture waits patiently for the end 

Of the spirit that clings in Ayod. 

 

Crisis framed will feed his fame. 

The journo’s conscience is cleared. 

As he shoos away the caws and claws 

Of the ebon harbinger bird. 

 

First world home, his guilt is borne 

A vulture squawking, “Why?” 

If he’d borne him to the tent 

Would he have survived? 

 

A shadow swings across the wall. 

The Pulitzer is framed 

By the swinging body of the man 

Who hung his head in shame. 

 

Decades pass and war goes on 

And famine grips the land. 

The Hunger Triangle forgotten by God 

Is Kongor, Waat, and Ayod

The Hunger Triangle

(Rewrite in Free Verse)

Rebel war in Sudan is

A hooded vulture

Stalking, hissing, waiting,

Anticipating the death

Of its intended meal.

Predation instinct in an ebon cape,

Tearing beak and slashing claws.

Carrion comfort to sate its empty maw.

Famine across the desert is

A skeleton once a boy

Crawling, teetering, falling,

Dragging a bag of bones

Across the arid scrubland.

A bloated belly full of starving pain.

Stick-thin limbs, a head too heavy for his neck.

The UN relief center is less than a mile away.

Governmental apathy is

A photo journo clicking away,

A Nikon shield for his guilt,

Witness to a dying flame,

Journalistic neutrality intact.

Should he tarry to carry the boy to the tent?

He shoos away the bird instead.

He is already late for his flight.

The hunger triangle is

Kongor, Waat, Ayod,

War, famine, apathy,

A vulture, a boy, a Pulitzer.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Swimming In Lessons

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/26/25 - Day 26 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now for our daily (optional) prompt. The word “sonnet” comes directly from the Italian sonetto, or “little song.” A traditional sonnet has a strict meter and rhyme scheme. It’s a strange form to have wormed its way into English, which is relatively unmetrical and rhyme-poor compared to Romance languages like Italian.

But thanks to William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and others, the sonnet in English bloomed. It also became a sort of rite of passage for poets, with the Victorians especially loving very strict sonnets.

To refresh you on the “rules” of the traditional sonnet:

14 lines
10 syllables per line
Those syllables are divided into five iambic feet. (An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word “admit” is a good example. In pronouncing it, you put more stress on the “mit” than the “ad.”
Rhyme schemes vary, but the Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg (three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet).
Sonnets are often thought of as not just little songs, but little essays, with the first six-to-eight or so lines building up a problem, the next four-to-six discussing it, and the last two-to-four coming to a conclusion.
Given all these rules, it’s perhaps surprising that love poems make up quite a chunk of sonnets in English, but maybe that’s just because love poems make up quite a chunk of all poems in English?

If you want to intimidate yourself about poetry in general and sonnets in particular, read this quote from Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody.

"To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and very strict ones of space; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully; these are the four great requirements of the poet in general; but they are never set so clearly, so imperatively, so urgently before any variety of poet as before the sonneteer."

And now, by way of illustration, let’s take a look at a few contemporary takes on the sonnet. The first, by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a pretty strict traditional sonnet. The next two –by Terrence Hayes and Alice Notley – are looser. And finally, the last one, by June Jordan, is a rather strict sonnet (rhyme- and meter-wise, though somewhat looser in line-specific syllable count) that doesn’t sound strict at all. It is joyfully informal in its language and tone.

After all this, here’s your prompt! Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something “sonnet-shaped.” Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want.

My Poem

Swimming In Lessons

(A Sonnet)

To float perchance to swim without a care

Can’t be a dream of mine without a blind

Inferred allegiance to a calm repair

Of decades long-held thoughts unkind

Thought to be a boy in love-strong arms held,

Too free to fear, too fearless to be foiled.

Unaware of games unfair I was felled

By manly games of topsy-turvy boys.

You would not see how close I came to last

Wide-eyed breaths and last-gasp panic bubbles.

Grown up guffaws shrouded your own pained past

Feigned indifference, you turned from my troubles.

With a lifetime in stasis not facing

My fears, I am now swimming free, racing.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Time Is a Basilisk (Off-Prompt)

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/25/25 - Day 25 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

Finally, here is our optional prompt for the day. In her poem, senzo, Evie Shockley recounts the experience of being at a live concert, relating it the act of writing poetry. Today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music, and tells how it moves you. It could be a Rolling Stones concert, your little sister’s middle school musical, or just someone whistling – it just needs to be something meaningful to you.


My Poem

(Off-Prompt)

Time Is a Basilisk

I

Anxiety crushes

Squeaky breaths from trembling lips.

Visions of crushed steel dripping hot blood.

Your newly-licensed daughter is

Somewhere out there

Just yesterday, it seems.

A baby giggling like a burbling brook.

II

Waiting for the elevator, staring at the down button,

Spotting you he stirs.

Perks up long enough to ask, “Have you seen my wife?”

Heart strewn in broken strands across memory’s stone-swept shore

You whisper-cry-hitch

“No, Dad, Mom’s been gone for quite a while now.”

III

A body’s betrayal pins him on display,

An indecent spotlight on this battered butterfly.

Aching knees conspiratorially drop him face-first in the drive.

Trembling hands admit defeat against the lightest opponents.

Seismic bowels shear and shift with incontinent indignities.

IV

The memories of his grandsons growing are fading lithographs.

Elderly yellowing scrim covers good intention with darkling dementia.

He looks at the woman he no longer dances with

And tremulously warbles,

“Why are you looking at me

Like that?”

V

Time is a basilisk.

We do our utmost to avoid its gaze.

For instinct instructs time will destruct

The immortality of foolhardy pride.

Once caught asking, “Where did all that time go?”

The soul is bound by the terrifying reality of

Petrifying mortality.