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
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.
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