NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 19th): The Ballad of Liba Gray

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Nineteen): Happy Saturday, everyone. We hope you’re ready to write some poems!

Today’s featured participant is Sara Hardy, who took me back to my 1980s childhood with her driving-and -singing poem for Day Eighteen.

Our resource for the day is a bit goofy. It’s the Gallery of Strange Museums. Some of the museums here don’t strike me as all that strange – more very local or specific. But the Wingnut Museum is definitely a bit odd, as is the World’s Largest Spool of Thread (less a museum than a roadside attraction), while the Hattiesburg Pocket Museum is a testament to the fact that people can – and do – make their own fun.

And now for our daily prompt – optional as always. This one is inspired by Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song.”

The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek for “goat song.” The song in Kelly’s poem is quite literally a goat song. The poem also describes a tragedy, both in the modern sense of an awful event, and the ancient dramatic sense of a play in which someone does something terrible, and the play’s action shows the consequences.

The poem has a timeless, could-have-happened-anywhere/anywhen quality that I associate with blues and folk ballads – including murder ballads (a subgenre of song dealing with a gruesome crime, first arising from broadsheet ballads sold at English executions, and which later came to America in forms like “The Knoxville Girl” and then morphed their way into country music).

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad. One way into this prompt may be to use it to retell a family tragedy or story, or to retell a crime or tragic event that occurred in your hometown.

Happy(?) writing!

Note before you read: Ah, tragedy is right up my blog theme's alley. And, a question mark after happy and before writing.

The Ballad of Liba Gray

They say she walked the orchard rows
In slippers made of lace,
With apple blossoms in her hair
And thunder on her face.
The rebbe swore she warned him once,
The blacksmith knew her cry —
She vanished when the frost came in,
Beneath a burning sky.

Her father owned the cider mill,
A drinker hard and mean.
He’d crush the apples with a curse
And never once came clean.
They found his boots by Sender’s Pond
The night the frostwind blew —
And all they saw was Liba’s shawl,
The rest the cattails knew.

The shamas spoke to Mrs. Blum
Who lived behind the hill.
She said she saw Liba flee
Her hands like winter chill.
The barn went up in flame that night,
No cause they could explain,
But on the wind they swore they heard
A mourner's song that turned to rain.

Now every year when harvest comes
And cider foams and flows,
The children say Liba walks
Where no cornflower grows.
And if you hear a fiddle wail
Past Sender’s Pond at night,
You best not look — just bow your head —
And keep the firelight bright.

- Oizys.