NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 9th): Echoes Beneath the Cracked Bell

From NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Nine: Welcome back, everyone, for Day Nine of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today, our featured participant is jasmine, whose ghazal for Day Eight pushes against, and with, the limits of transalation and English’s habit of stealing/adopting/buying at wholesale words from other languages.

Our featured resource for the day is the online gallery of the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Although it may be most famous for its witch trials, Salem was a seafaring town whose sailors and shipowners brought back all manner of items from their travels – which became the initial source of the museum’s collection. The museum has a stunning group of “Asian Export” items – goods that were crafted in India, Japan, China, and other locations visited by Salem’s ships (often as part of an overall trade in tea, porcelain, and textiles) – to appeal to an American/European market. That’s how you wind up with things like this French-styled dressing table with elaborate lacquer-work.

And here’s our optional prompt for the day. Like music, poetry offers us a way to play with and experience sound. This can be through meter, rhyme, varying line lengths, assonance, alliteration, and other techniques that call attention not just to the meaning of words, but the way they echo and resonate against each other. For a look at some of these sound devices in action, read Robert Hillyer’s poem, Fog. It uses both rhyme and uneven line lengths to create a slow, off-kilter rhythm that heightens the poem’s overall ominousness. Today we’d like to challenge you to try writing a poem of your own that uses rhyme, but without adhering to specific line lengths. For extra credit, reference a very specific sound, like the buoy in Hillyer’s poem.

Happy (or at least atmospheric) writing!

Echoes Beneath the Cracked Bell

The wind is thin, a whip through wires,
its breath a hiss, the light, a slant—
beneath a sky that spits, expires,
the bell cracks wide, a sharpened chant.

A low hum drips, a venom’s cry,
it fills the night, the waking start—
a thousand voices pulse and sigh,
and storm below with broken heart.

The trolley groans, its iron bite,
a clanging jolt, the streets, a bruise—
like glass beneath a boot’s last strike,
or teeth that snap, a flare, a fuse.

The siren wails, the evening bleeds,
its song unspools, a frayed decree.
Still, the streets refuse to sleep,
their pulse, alive—unbroken, free.

Do you hear it?
The shouts that cut through glass and bone,
the shuffle of the feet alone,
the bell that tolls not for the dead,
but for the waking, mad instead—
a child’s cry beneath the hum,
a shadow bent—its whispers come—
and still it trembles—rise, rise—

Though rain falls cold, tomorrow’s blind—
today is ours, and we, not lone.
The bell rings louder, waking strife,
its echoes stir the rust, the knife,
the silent scream of worlds unknown.

And in the cracks, the fury churns,
a fire lit from dust and stone—
it rises up with steady hands,
and clenched in fists, the broken stand.

The streets are deep with aching feet,
their boots like thunder in the dark,
the words they spit—a bitter beat,
the fire caught, a searing spark.

Can you taste it?
The iron edge beneath the tongue,
the weight of years, the songs unsung,
the bell’s loud crash—its final toll—
a sound that splits the heart in whole—
the waking rises, comes to claim
the thunder of this broken name.

- Oizys.