NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 26th): Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Six): We finally made it to the weekend, everyone! 

Today’s featured participant is Eden Ligon, whose “live concert” poem for Day Twenty-Five shows all the sweetness of music that has ripened with time.

Our daily resource is the online collection of Spain’s Reina Sofia Museum, which houses an incredible collection of modern and contemporary art. You can find Picassos aplenty here, of course, but also things like this vertiginous sculpture that makes me think of a rollercoaster, this mysterious Magritte, and this collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And now for our daily (optional) prompt. The word “sonnet” comes directly from the Italian sonetto, or “little song.” A traditional sonnet has a strict meter and rhyme scheme. It’s a strange form to have wormed its way into English, which is relatively unmetrical and rhyme-poor compared to Romance languages like Italian.

But thanks to William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and others, the sonnet in English bloomed. It also became a sort of rite of passage for poets, with the Victorians especially loving very strict sonnets.

To refresh you on the “rules” of the traditional sonnet:

• 14 lines
• 10 syllables per line
• Those syllables are divided into five iambic feet. (An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word “admit” is a good example. In pronouncing it, you put more stress on the “mit” than the “ad.”
• Rhyme schemes vary, but the Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg (three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet).
• Sonnets are often thought of as not just little songs, but little essays, with the first six-to-eight or so lines building up a problem, the next four-to-six discussing it, and the last two-to-four coming to a conclusion.
• Given all these rules, it’s perhaps surprising that love poems make up quite a chunk of sonnets in English, but maybe that’s just because love poems make up quite a chunk of all poems in English?

If you want to intimidate yourself about poetry in general and sonnets in particular, read this quote from Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody.

To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and very strict ones of space; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully; these are the four great requirements of the poet in general; but they are never set so clearly, so imperatively, so urgently before any variety of poet as before the sonneteer.

And now, by way of illustration, let’s take a look at a few contemporary takes on the sonnet. The first, by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a pretty strict traditional sonnet. The next two –by Terrence Hayes and Alice Notley – are looser. And finally, the last one, by June Jordan, is a rather strict sonnet (rhyme- and meter-wise, though somewhat looser in line-specific syllable count) that doesn’t sound strict at all. It is joyfully informal in its language and tone.

After all this, here’s your prompt! Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something “sonnet-shaped.” Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want.

Happy writing!

Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

They clad us in silk, but stitched us in chains,
Our laughter bought with blood, our songs with sighs,
We wore their pleasures like embroidered stains,
A garden caged beneath a painted sky.

You crowned our throats with coins, not diadems,
Fed hunger with illusions of a throne,
Yet we, who danced within your stratagems,
Bent music till the very walls were stone.

No master's hand shall write our epitaph,
No borrowed tool shall build our freedom's flight,
We are the storm, the silence, and the laugh,
We break — we burn — we blaze — we birth — we fight.

Each daughter bears a hammer in her breast;
We raze your house to raise our own red crest.

- Oizys,
(The Sonneteeress)
[Since I learned the word "sonneteer" today. Please don't kill me. I won't use it again. Ha, ha.]

Note: This poem maintains the traditional sonnet structure: 14 lines with approximately 10 syllables each organized into three quatrains and a final couplet. It follows the Shakespearean rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg). In my poem, the "E" rhymes (epitaph and laugh), are not perfect. They form a slant/near rhyme, which is common and accepted in English poetry. As for the iambic pentameter, I tried my best. Then I laughed and gave up! So now: Accuracy in iambic pentameter is about flow, not perfection. We honor the spirit of the meter, not enslave ourselves to it. Just like Lorde said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." By breaking a few rules, I am actually adhering more closely to the theme of my poem: rebellion, reinvention, and radical self-construction (tool by tool, step by step).