Sunday, April 27, 2025

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.



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