OctPoWriMo Day 5. It's In Our Blood
How do we get under the skin with our poetry? Using word choice to create a mood? Creating a rhythm that makes the heart race? Making shocking statements that make the blood boil? How can you make today’s poem pulse?
Example Poem: “The True Lover” by A. E. Houseman from Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre(Aal)
The True Lover
The lad came to the door at night,
When lovers crown their vows,
And whistled soft and out of sight
In shadow of the boughs.
‘I shall not vex you with my face
Henceforth, my love, for aye;
So take me in your arms a space
Before the east is grey.
‘When I from hence away am past
I shall not find a bride,
And you shall be the first and last
I ever lay beside.’
She heard and went and knew not why;
Her heart to his she laid;
Light was the air beneath the sky
But dark under the shade.
‘Oh do you breathe, lad, that your breast
Seems not to rise and fall,
And here upon my bosom prest
There beats no heart at all?’
‘Oh loud, my girl, it once would knock,
You should have felt it then;
But since for you I stopped the clock
It never goes again.’
‘Oh lad, what is it, lad that drips
Wet from your neck on mine?
What is it falling on my lips,
My lad, that tastes of brine?’
Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear,
For when the knife has slit
The throat across from ear to ear
‘Twill bleed because of it.’
Under the stars the air was light
But dark below the boughs,
The still air of the speechless night,
When lovers crown their vows.
~A. E. Housman
Prompt: Write a poem using blood as a symbol for life, a romantic encounter, and/or death.
Possible Poetic form: Four line stanzas (quatrains) with the rhyme scheme ABAB.
~
A note before you read: There are evenings when the air feels heavier than usual, like it’s holding onto everything you’re trying to let go of. I’d been thinking about inheritance, not the kind you can spend, but the kind that seeps into your skin, sits behind your voice. For some, leaving is less about distance; and more about purification. So I tried to write that, the slow separation of self from the echoes that built it.
The Ritual of Leaving
I separate blood from water in my body,
it’s an old ritual, quiet as rinsing rice.
You’d think I’d spill, or sway, or tremble oddly,
but it’s as calm as cutting something twice.
The first cut frees the faces from my marrow,
the second clears the names that still insist.
I let them drift; pale echoes, faint and narrow,
until they fade into a harmless mist.
I drain the voice that called me by a daughter,
the hands that fed me silence, meal by meal.
I keep the bones, they still remember water,
but teach the heart what not to want or feel.
By dawn, the body hums without its story.
It beats, but not for lineage or name.
I wipe the bowl, rinse off the fleeting glory
and start again, unspelled, the same.
Some part of me still hums at the edge of the bowl,
a faint reminder that even when you wash something clean,
the water remembers.
~ Oizys.
An after-note: Some rituals aren’t meant for anyone to witness. This one came to me like a warning whispered through running water, you know, the kind of forgetting that doesn’t ask for forgiveness. For some, separation isn’t cruelty, it’s clarity. Because that is how the body relearns stillness when memory won’t let go.
P.S.: I wrote this one in a kind of trance, late evening, when the city noise started thinning out and everything felt rinsed, almost suspended. The idea arrived half-dreaming: what if unloving could be procedural, clean, like washing something over and over until it turns translucent? The poem resisted dramatics, stayed low-voiced. I let it. Sometimes writing feels less like creation, more like performing a quiet extraction... word by word, removing what still bleeds.