NaPoWriMo - April, 2026 - Poem: Take my Heart

NaPoWriMo 2026

04/07/26 - Day 7 of 30

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NaPoWriMo Prompt

Finally, here’s today’s prompt — optional, as always. In her poem, “Front Yard Rhyme,” Cecily Parks evokes the sing-songy beats that accompany girls’ clapping games, and jump-rope and skipping rhymes. Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that emulates these songs – something to snap, clap, and jump around to.

My Poem

Take my Heart

One day you and I will

Both be

Old enough to see what

They see

Until then we'll find our

Own way

Without hearing half what

They say.

Take my hand and take me

With you

Take my heart, and I'll be

Yours, too.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2026 - Poem: Among the Lungs

NaPoWriMo 2026

04/06/26 - Day 6 of 30

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NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now, to put theory in our practice, here’s our optional prompt! This one takes its inspiration from Yentl van Stokkum’s poem, “It’s the Warmest Summer on Record Babe,” which blends casual, almost blasé phrasing with surreal events like getting advice from a bumblebee. In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream.


My Poem

Among the Lungs

If I sound like a fish out of water

It's only because I've just flown

From the coolest of clear waters

That make up my ancestral home

To this coastline of pebbles and scree

This hostile and alien debris, you see

I'm standing here chatting with

Two-legged creatures, not fish,

Wishing for all I was worth

To go back to my piscine hearth

Wipe off that grin and throw me back in!

NaPoWriMo - April, 2026 - Poem: Beds of Nails

NaPoWriMo 2026

04/05/26 - Day 5 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now, here’s our prompt for the day — totally optional, as usual. The Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous two-line poem:

Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Here’s an English translation.

                I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you ask?
                I don’t know, but I feel it happening and am tortured.

I thought about this poem the other day when I read a social media post collecting sentences from Charles Darwin’s letters, including:

                “Oh my God how do I hate species & varieties.”

                “I am very tired, very stomachy & hate nearly the whole world.”

                “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”

                “I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees.”

                “I am languid & bedeviled & hate writing & hate everybody.”

I must confess, the idea of being so grumpy that you have come to hate clover and bees is highly amusing to me. Today, your challenge is to take a page from Catullus and Darwin, and write a poem in which you talk about disliking something – particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.

My Poem

Beds of Nails

Oh, how I hate
Clipping my nails!
If they'd just wait
Instead of growing so fast.

They're thick and glossy
And naturally round
Full cuticles
And nailbeds abound.

Hangnails don't hang
Around long at the ends
Of my fingers sublimely,
Lusciously tipped.

No need for gel or
Polish on these
My nails that grow
Out quickly with ease.

If only I didn't
Have to spend
Time clipping nails
Every weekend.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2026 - Poem: The Snow Burial

NaPoWriMo 2026

04/04/26 - Day 4 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

Finally, here’s today’s optional prompt. In his poem, “Spring Thunder,” Mark van Doren brings us a short, haunting evocation of weather and the change in seasons. Today, we’d like to challenge you to craft your own short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.


My Poem

The Snow Burial

The day after the city's biggest blizzard

Was the day of my grandma's funeral.

Three feet of hard-packed snow

Was the day of my burial.

The bitter cold, the frosted windows

Kept me supplicated

At eleven, I already knew

What it was to be suffocated

From under my blankets

I pled and cried no

No, I didn't want to

And No, I wouldn't go

I could've stood the biting cold and

I could've held my grandma's cold hand,

But holding the hand of the man with the cold plan

Was something I couldn't stand.

I couldn't stand to look at the grey clouds.

So, I burrowed under my burial shrouds.

He begged me to go.

I buried my innocence and cried again, NO!

NaPoWriMo - April, 2026 - Poem: Cowed

NaPoWriMo 2026

04/02/26 - Day 2 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

My Poem

Cowed

All we were doing was walking home from school,

My sister and I.

Awkward in our shared innocence,

We tumbled by.

The bully came rushing out of her house,

Flying and snarling.

Barely stopping in front of us to scream,

Spitting and cursing.

Oh, how I longed for the spirit to fight.

Woe was me,

For the bully punched my sister in the face,

As I stood alee.

And I fought my instinct,

Yet I knew

To grow up would be

To mewl.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2026 - Poem: Sunny Smiles

NaPoWriMo 2026

04/01/26 - Day 1 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now, here is our (optional) prompt for the day! The tanka is an ancient Japanese poetic form. In contemporary English versions, it often takes the shape of a five-line poem with a 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7 syllable-count – kind of like a haiku that decided to keep going. 

Some recent examples include L. Lamar Wilson’s “Aubade Tanka,” Tarik Dobbs’s “Commuter Tanka,” and Antoinette Brim-Bell’s “Insomniac Tankas.”   And here’s a sort of parody tanka by Paul Violi, which starts out with the kind of cliché image that you might find in a thousand imitations of classic Japanese poetry, and ends up somewhere very different. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own tanka – or multi-tanka poem. Theme and tone are up to you, but try to maintain the five-line stanza and syllable count.

My Poem

Sunny Smiles

Here's a holy pose:

Golden Oreos, prostrate,

Sugared discs displayed

Creamy white and sunny smiles.

Are there any left for me?