NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 24th): Rehearsing silence in a house full of noise

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Four):Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twenty-Four of our annual poetry-writing challenge!

Our featured participant for the day is haphazard, whose birdsong poem for Day Twenty-Three places primacy on the “gaps in the music.”

Today’s daily resource is the Art Institute of Chicago, where just searching the collection for the word “stars,” I found this amazing quilt, a very fancy-looking Soviet plate, and an illustration of the constellation Leo from a medieval Arabic astronomical guide.

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.

Happy writing!

Note: I love the “Family Portrait” by P!nk and I continued the narrative I began in a recent poem on generational grief. So, here it is, this is my concerto for the unspoken, in five movements.

Rehearsing silence in a house full of noise
(Concerto for a Broken Spine and a Dinner Table)
Inspired by “Family Portrait” – P!nk
(And my yesterday's post.)

I. The Tuning Fork Years

The house begins in B minor,
where the floorboards whine like throats clearing for apologies
no one will offer.
Our voices—spoons clinking, doors sighing,
each one a note from a sheet no one agreed to read.

This was our tremolo:
a flutter of nerves beneath every conversation,
a vibration too subtle to name but impossible to unhear.

No one conducted this movement.
We simply tuned ourselves to the key of survival
and played on.

II. The Chorus We Never Wrote

Ma hums under her breath—
not a song,
but the incantation of women who’ve forgotten
what softness sounds like.

You call it cooking.
I call it self-preservation in cumin and turmeric.
The gas stove, a quiet metronome counting down her last nerve.

Her bangles ticked like metronomes,
each clink a countdown to eruption, or worse—
to nothing at all.

She conducts from the kitchen now,
baton replaced by a spatula,
applause replaced by silence that won’t clap back.

III. Dad, Allegro Appassionato

He plays silence like a cello.
Heavy, weeping, respectable.
The kind of man who mistakes absence for dignity.

His slippers drag across the tiles,
a rhythm we all grew up dancing to.

He is dissonance in a father’s costume—
the space between two notes too close to comfort,
yet too far to reconcile.

We thought he was the audience.
Turns out, he was the ghost of the conductor—
left halfway through the performance,
but still whispering through the wings.

IV. Sibling, Countermelody

We were meant to harmonize,
but our notes clash—
you, sharp as broken glass;
me, flat as the dreams I stitched into pillow seams.

Still, we rehearse.
Still, we sing.

Our fights—crescendos with no resolution,
rising until something snapped,
then falling into a cold rest,
as a moment of false peace
where no apology lives.

You wanted to solo.
I wanted us to blend.
Neither of us learned to listen.

V. Coda: The Only Living Voice

Someday, someone will ask me what our family sounded like.
And I’ll say:
Like applause at the wrong moment.
Like a hymn with all the vowels drowned.
Like someone pressing “rewind” on a scream.

And I’ll walk barefoot across the memory footprints—
Ma’s slippers, Dad’s dragged shoes, your stomps,
my quiet tiptoes—
all of us leaving music in dust patterns.

This was our symphony.
Unfinished.
Unforgiving.
Still echoing.

- Oizys.