From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Seven): Happy Sunday, everyone. I hope you find it to be a relaxing and inspiring day for writing poems.
Our featured participant for the day is Hayaathi – Goddess of Sehnsucht, whose first attempt at a sonnet brings a lovely blend of grief and self-deprecating humor.
Today’s daily resource is the online collection of the Harvard Art Museums, where you can find this bright and pretty drawing of a tulip poplar, a rather forbidding poster comparing various causes of death in Wisconsin, this beautiful jade paperweight, and much more.
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.
Happy writing!
Nothing endures but the whim of the breeze
The kingdoms of men crumble faster than a clover’s sigh.
In the painting, a man is tied to the cannon's yawning mouth —
forgotten now by the breeze that carries away screams like pollen.
Even walls remember our names.
In the corner, a boy stoops, unnoticed,
Plucking a single dandelion from the mud,
While armies sharpen swords nearby, deaf to the golden hush.
A peeling mural on a battered building
whispers of those who leaned and laughed here.
Empires may forget, but paint remembers where we leaned.
Hidden now by ivy:
a gold mine of raw, explosive, burning material,
laughing where no one sees.
Beneath the crumbling sunburst, a corner:
Two children, handprints smeared in blue,
History is carved by calloused hands:
a hammer, an exhausted eye, a soot-stained shirt button.
Walls crumble faster than promises:
a tiny kiss, cracked barbed wire, broken slogans.
Roots run deeper than exile:
a single corn stalk, a hummingbird, a mother’s weary glance.
Peace is the sharpest blade:
a child peeking from behind riot shields.
Dreams are stitched in daylight:
someone sewing a quilt, a window left ajar.
Color blooms where concrete crushes:
a tiny slingshot tucked into a belt.
Earth keeps the receipts of betrayal:
a river spirit hidden in a swirl, a cracked feather.
In the earth’s bitter marrow:
an arsenal of raw, explosive, burning roots,
a gold mine buried in betrayal.
Because political is personal.
It’s not some distant, sterile thing happening in suits and marble rooms:
It’s your grandmother’s missing land.
It’s the factory smoke in your lungs.
It’s the job you didn’t get because of your name.
It’s how your body is read (or misread) walking down the street.
It’s the mural you paint because you were never meant to survive,
the temple you build from broken, stained glass,
the arsenal hidden under the cobblestones.
History chews up its bravest children.
A lone sneaker dangles from a power line,
paint dripping down like blood.
I once wore shoes just like that,
running from a future sharpening knives for me,
running from a fate already closing its fists.
But tomorrow, barefoot, I will plant myself deeper, braver.
Empires die of amnesia.
No flag remembers the hands that sewed it.
On the mural’s cracked belly, a boy
traces his own face:
brown, wide-eyed, defiant:
beside the bullet holes they forgot to paint over.
He smiles like a sunrise they can't bomb away.
It was always political because it was always personal.
- Oizys.
Note: This poem was born from Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1884 painting, "Blowing from Guns in British India," which depicts the execution of Namdhari Sikhs by British colonial forces in 1872. In the scene, a man is tied to a cannon, seconds away from a death so brutal it was meant to be both punishment and spectacle. The silence was visible not in faces, but in posture, in the way soldiers stood, in the way the crowd blurred at the edges, anonymous and unmoving. I kept thinking how history doesn’t only survive in the monuments of the victors. It lives in the quiet places too: a child's handprint under ivy, a forgotten mural on a crumbling wall, a slingshot tucked into a belt. This poem is a small act of remembrance for the unnamed, the unnoticed, the ones the breeze could never quite erase.
Our featured participant for the day is Hayaathi – Goddess of Sehnsucht, whose first attempt at a sonnet brings a lovely blend of grief and self-deprecating humor.
Today’s daily resource is the online collection of the Harvard Art Museums, where you can find this bright and pretty drawing of a tulip poplar, a rather forbidding poster comparing various causes of death in Wisconsin, this beautiful jade paperweight, and much more.
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.
Happy writing!
Nothing endures but the whim of the breeze
The kingdoms of men crumble faster than a clover’s sigh.
In the painting, a man is tied to the cannon's yawning mouth —
forgotten now by the breeze that carries away screams like pollen.
Even walls remember our names.
In the corner, a boy stoops, unnoticed,
Plucking a single dandelion from the mud,
While armies sharpen swords nearby, deaf to the golden hush.
A peeling mural on a battered building
whispers of those who leaned and laughed here.
Empires may forget, but paint remembers where we leaned.
Hidden now by ivy:
a gold mine of raw, explosive, burning material,
laughing where no one sees.
Beneath the crumbling sunburst, a corner:
Two children, handprints smeared in blue,
History is carved by calloused hands:
a hammer, an exhausted eye, a soot-stained shirt button.
Walls crumble faster than promises:
a tiny kiss, cracked barbed wire, broken slogans.
Roots run deeper than exile:
a single corn stalk, a hummingbird, a mother’s weary glance.
Peace is the sharpest blade:
a child peeking from behind riot shields.
Dreams are stitched in daylight:
someone sewing a quilt, a window left ajar.
Color blooms where concrete crushes:
a tiny slingshot tucked into a belt.
Earth keeps the receipts of betrayal:
a river spirit hidden in a swirl, a cracked feather.
In the earth’s bitter marrow:
an arsenal of raw, explosive, burning roots,
a gold mine buried in betrayal.
Because political is personal.
It’s not some distant, sterile thing happening in suits and marble rooms:
It’s your grandmother’s missing land.
It’s the factory smoke in your lungs.
It’s the job you didn’t get because of your name.
It’s how your body is read (or misread) walking down the street.
It’s the mural you paint because you were never meant to survive,
the temple you build from broken, stained glass,
the arsenal hidden under the cobblestones.
History chews up its bravest children.
A lone sneaker dangles from a power line,
paint dripping down like blood.
I once wore shoes just like that,
running from a future sharpening knives for me,
running from a fate already closing its fists.
But tomorrow, barefoot, I will plant myself deeper, braver.
Empires die of amnesia.
No flag remembers the hands that sewed it.
On the mural’s cracked belly, a boy
traces his own face:
brown, wide-eyed, defiant:
beside the bullet holes they forgot to paint over.
He smiles like a sunrise they can't bomb away.
It was always political because it was always personal.
- Oizys.
Note: This poem was born from Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1884 painting, "Blowing from Guns in British India," which depicts the execution of Namdhari Sikhs by British colonial forces in 1872. In the scene, a man is tied to a cannon, seconds away from a death so brutal it was meant to be both punishment and spectacle. The silence was visible not in faces, but in posture, in the way soldiers stood, in the way the crowd blurred at the edges, anonymous and unmoving. I kept thinking how history doesn’t only survive in the monuments of the victors. It lives in the quiet places too: a child's handprint under ivy, a forgotten mural on a crumbling wall, a slingshot tucked into a belt. This poem is a small act of remembrance for the unnamed, the unnoticed, the ones the breeze could never quite erase.
An epic poem, Oizys, and what an awful, tragic scene to paint and to write about. I agree with what you say about history living in the quiet places. A stunning tribute to ‘the unnamed, the unnoticed, the ones the breeze could never quite erase’. These lines are so powerful: ‘forgotten now by the breeze that carries away screams like pollen’ and ‘history is carved by calloused hands’. But it’s the boy plucking a single dandelion from the mud and the ‘two children, handprints smeared in blue’ that stand out for me, and:
ReplyDeleteDreams are stitched in daylight:
someone sewing a quilt, a window left ajar.’
Thank you so much, Kim, your words truly mean a lot. History often thunders in our textbooks, but it also hums in the silences we rarely notice and I wanted to grasp that hum and share it. Your detailed appreciation means a lot to me. <3
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