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

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/25/25 - Day 25 of 30

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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.

NaPoWriMo - April, 2025 - Poem: Music Crept In

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/24/25 - Day 24 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


NaPoWriMo Prompt

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. One fundamental aspect of music is its communal nature. While music can be made by a single person, of course, it’s often made in groups. Rock bands, orchestras, church choirs – they all involve making music together. And often, we’re playing or performing music that was written by, or inspired by, other people.

In her poem, Duet, Lisa Russ Spaar tells the story of two sisters making music together, based on two pre-existing songs by different artists. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that involves people making music together, and that references – with a lyric or line – a song or poem that is important to you.

My Poem

Inspirational poem: “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” - Angelou, Maya

Music Crept In

Music would suffocate in a squalid, rank, open-air dorm,

A deep South summer, prison sweat, festering stew.

The sour-spore, shameful, heat-stench solitude of men,

Pooled in night-sweat damp bunks, hating themselves,

Music would tremble among

No-eye-contact men forever on guard,

Stone-jawed men keeping silent counsel,

Always alert to rise up and kill first.

Unless,

Unless,

Music crept in on

The squeaking drum clicking of guard shoe shuffles,

Music added the staccato snare rhythm of

A heat-sapped insomniac tapping a bunk rail.

Unless

Another inmate hummed along in quiet surrender,

Another infused weary whistling rhythm,

And another sung lyrics in low alto crows,

A fluttering brief flight of caged bird freedom.

Unless

Music crooned to simmering brutality perched on a knife edge

And brutal men were soothed for a soaring moment.

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

NaPoWriMo 2025

04/10/25 - Day 10 of 30

NaPoWriMo.net Article


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.