OctPoWriMo Day 18. But They’ve Seen It

OctPoWriMo Day 18. But They’ve Seen It

Every so often some critic announces that poetry is dead. As if centuries of oral and written traditions had a heart attack and couldn’t be resuscitated. Of course, they’re wrong, but someone will say it again anyway. In a way, poetry is a cryptid: an extinct creature that manages to survive in the wild by hiding from most people. But the people who discover it, are very adamant about its existence.

Example Poem: “Mother Talks Back to the Monster” by Carrie Shipers from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection

Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,
kissed his forehead and tucked him in.
I turned on his night-light and looked for you
in the closet and under the bed. I told him
you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell
your breath, your musty fur. I remember
all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall,
click of your claws, the hand that hovered
just above my ankles if I left them exposed.
Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere—
unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal
two days out of date. And even worse
than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside,
trying not to let my love become so tangled
with anxiety my son thinks they’re the same.
When he says he’s seen your tail or heard
your heavy step, I insist that you aren’t real.
Soon he’ll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams.
If you get lonely after he’s asleep, you can
always come downstairs. I’ll be sitting
at the kitchen table with the dishes
I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up.
We can drink hot tea and talk about
the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

~Carrie Shipers

Prompt: Remember your childhood monster. Did it emerge from the closet, or under the bed? What did it look like? What sounds did it make? What did it sound like? When did you grow out of it, or how did you overcome it? What would you talk about if you met it now?

Possible form: A narrative poem

~

But They’ve Seen It

When the power cut slid over the lane like a lid,

I counted the ceiling fan’s halted blades: three knives

pointed at the cot where my legs refused to straighten.

You lived in the inch between wardrobe and wall,

in the breath of naphthalene balls and damp notebooks,

your fur the color of dust bunnies and old chalk.

You announced yourself with the latch of the steel trunk,

that soft clink becoming footsteps if I listened wrong

and the pressure cooker’s hiss from the kitchen,

rising to a whistle I was sure was your name.

On the calendar Krishna kept playing his flute;

your shadow dog-eared the month and would not turn the page.

Some nights you were only a palm at my ankle,

hovering, patient, until I forgot the rule:

blankets must armor the shin, toes tucked like contraband.

Other nights you were the geometry of fear:

right angles of the study table, the gulf under the cot,

the theorem proving I was small enough to vanish.

I told Ma I needed a night-light; she gave me stories.

“Monsters hate numbers,” she said, “count to a hundred.

Monsters hate ginger,” she said, “breathe like tea.”

I learned to name you into fractions: half breath,

quarter scrape, a remainder of nothing at all,

until morning solved you with crows and school bell.

I grew taller than the wardrobe, left behind the street

with its neem tree and hammock of power lines.

I learned other latches: email, HR portals,

locks that open at a thumbprint and refuse to know me.

My monster, I outwalked you; or said I did;

into apartments where under-beds are storage, not abyss.

Tonight, after doomscrolling the usual shipwrecks,

I catch you again in the shiny emptiness of a screen,

in the pixelated static when the router blinks red,

in the quiet that follows a message I shouldn’t send.

Your breath still smells of damp and test ink.

You still lift the corner of everything I claim is firm.

Sit. The kettle is louder than we remember.

I won’t pretend you weren’t real; you were my first editor,

crossing out the easy endings, making me revise the dark.

Tell me what you do when children sleep:

do you keep the rules of blankets and counting,

or have you softened with age like old rubber bands?

I will tell you what it’s like to be outgrown:

how love tangles with worry like earbuds in a pocket,

how success has a hunger you recognize as kin,

how closets are cleaner and minds are not.

I’ll pour you tea, let the steam fog the mirror,

and we’ll watch ourselves appear, then fade, then appear:

until the fan hums back, until the router steadies,

until someone in a nearby flat laughs in their kitchen,

and we agree on this small truce:

you need the dark to stay mythic,

I need the dark to keep honest,

and both of us, for once, can share the bed.

~ Oizys.

[Some thoughts: The “monster” is fear: specifically the shape-shifting anxiety that starts in childhood and matures with you. As a kid, it’s under the bed and behind the wardrobe; as an adult, it morphs into email latches, HR portals, and the red blink of the router. By the end, we have to stop denying it and negotiates a truce: fear won’t vanish, but it can be named, managed, even… talked to. As prompt mentions, critics say poetry (or monsters) are dead; insiders insist they’ve seen the creature. I argue both are real, but mostly visible to those who look in the dark. It’s also an answer to: why keep writing? Because the monster (anxiety, grief, vigilance) keeps returning. Writing makes the visit civil. We never fully “outgrow” fear; we outgrow the story you tell about it.]