NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 30th): She Who Burned Beautifully

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Thirty): Wow, we made it, everyone! Today’s the final day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. We hope you make it to the end of the day with thirty new poems under your belt. But even if you didn’t manage to keep up with the whole poem-a-day thing, we hope you had fun!

We’ll be back tomorrow with our final featured participant and some closing thoughts for the year’s challenge, but in the meantime, our featured participant for today is Catching Lines, who brings us an elegy for Janis Joplin in response to Day 29’s inspired-by-the-music-makers prompt.

Our final resource is MatterPort Discover, a site that lets you take virtual tours of all kinds of museums, ranging from the National Museum of Ireland to the Bicycle Museum of America.

Finally, here’s the last prompt of this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo (optional, as always)! In his meandering poem, “Grateful Dead Tapes,” poet Ed Skoog riffs on the eponymous tapes that he’s found in a secondhand store, remembering various instances of hearing the band, both live and in recording. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that also describes different times in which you’ve heard the same band or piece of music across your lifetime.

Happy writing!

Note: I almost gave up. And I tried my best to wrap this up without giving up this year. I will always come back to this.

She Who Burned Beautifully

(for the songs that found me when no one else did)

Oizys, mother of the sharpest silences: hear me now.

They played that song again—

the one that howls like a woman unspooling her bones

on marble floors too clean for grief.

I was thirteen, and I screamed.

At him.

At the godfather of my silence.

At the man who carved his name in thunder

and called it parenting.

That day, I tore through the wallpaper of obedience,

raised my voice like a temple bell,

and the song rose with me.

War drums.

Chords like broken bangles.

A voice that wasn’t mine but knew my rage

like a sister.

Years later, locked away in velvet cages

stitched with gold and expectations,

I escaped.

Not with a suitcase—no,

with nothing but a name on my tongue

that meant sorrow and sovereignty:

Oizys.

I walked through strange cities

where no one knew how to pronounce me,

but I played that same song,

a siren of survival,

and the walls of every hotel room shivered

as I danced like a girl unchained

but still carrying her rusted manacles in her purse

like relics.

The air smelled of cardamom and gasoline. My wrists still bore the red threads of home.

The third time I heard it,

I was on the floor of my own apartment,

cold tea beside me,

achievement collapsing like a palace made of sugar.

I whispered:

“I am not capable.”

The song didn’t disagree.

It hummed around me, ancient and cruel,

as if to say—

“Then be incapable.

But burn anyway.”

“Even broken things can echo,” she sang,

and I believed her, for once.

Now when it plays,

I don’t cry.

I open my wrists—not with blades—

but with bracelets of fire,

the kind only a woman forged in rage and ruin can wear.

I sing back.

I sing back, with rusted manacles now melted into melody.

And somewhere,

the gods of HeeraMandi nod from their carved balconies,

their silks stained with blood and rosewater,

knowing I’ve earned my own music.

- Oizys.

Another Note: Things have been difficult recently. I started the challenge with a lot of hope; actually kickstarted early. But once April began, I fell behind a bit. Still, I kept writing bits and pieces for the prompts, thinking I’d post them here and there, eventually. And I did. I found time, caught up, and kept going. And… I got featured. For the first time. Woah. Towards the end, though, things got heavier. More chaos. More anger. More sickness. More weddings (bad…?). More exploitation. More hurt. More loneliness. More humiliation. Just more difficult days. But I stayed. I posted. Even though, near the end, I kept feeling like giving up. Even the second last day, I posted that one quite late. And today’s April 30th prompt too. I didn’t want to give up so easily.

But part of me kept putting it off. Stubborn. Delaying and delaying, maybe because another part didn’t want this to end. That’s always been me: delaying or ignoring endings because I’m scared to confront them. I procrastinate until regret starts swelling in my bones. But this time, I tried. I tried to fight through the pain, through the restraining thoughts and I posted.

Had to write it on mobile. Haha. Not my usual style. Mostly, I do it with my laptop, some randomly old notebooks, a book or two and a pen.

But to win a battle, you do what you have to. I think I’ll always come back to this. That fight—the internal one—was the root of this poem. This month, I stuck to every theme, every prompt, went beyond and above just to hold on to it. But this final one: I took it purely as inspiration. I poured my conflict into it. Let the rage shape it. Let my sorrow speak. And I wrote it. I’ll always come back to this. A flag point. A fire I lit. And proof that even when I thought I couldn't (perfectly)—I did (even if not perfectly).

P.S.: Yeah, I know—it’s all very dramatic and sappy for just a yearly NaPoWriMo post. But hey, when you live inside your head 24/7, even poetry becomes a war diary. Let me have this one.