NaPoWriMo 2026 [2nd April] - Left of the Courtyard

NaPoWriMo 2026 [2nd April]

Day Two

Welcome back for the second day of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone. We hope you feel invigorated after the first day of the challenge. And my apologies to those of you who had comments marked as spam yesterday — sometimes whatever algorithm Disqus uses to flag spam gets a wee bit over-enthusiastic!

Our featured participant today is aetherianessence, where you’ll find a response to Day One’s prompt that shows you just how much feeling the small form of the tanka can accommodate.

Today’s resource is the nineteenth century poet and critic Matthew Arnold’s essay, “The Study of Poetry.” Arnold believed that the fundamental purposes of poetry were to uplift and console. Do you agree? Maybe you think it should annoy or perplex? I’m somewhat partial to the idea of poems as little puzzles with surprises in them, or doorways into unfamiliar ways of thinking. And I find Arnold’s thesis a little strange given that “Dover Beach,” one of his most famous poems, ends in such an unsettling way.

Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Happy writing!

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I remember the courtyard of my grandmother's
how the red oxide floor held the day’s heat
long after the sun had gone—
a slow-burning memory under bare feet.

I remember the courtyard of my grandmother's
smelling faintly of wet earth and iron,
the hand pump groaning like an old man
who had seen too much.

The hand pump coughed up water
the color of old coins,
and I would rinse my palms
as if I had done something wrong.

From the kitchen,
the smell of tea.
From the mud oven across the street,
the waft of baked biscuits.

Ma would call my name from inside,
like it belonged to her more than me,
her voice stretched thin with evening,
and I would pretend not to hear,
counting the cracks in the cement
as if they were maps.

Somewhere, a TV flickered, 
grainy voices slipping through the walls,
men speaking too fast,
maps I couldn’t understand
flashing and vanishing.

I didn’t know the names then,
only that the adults grew quieter
when those voices came on,
as if sound itself had become fragile.

Across the lane,
boys argued over a cracked bat,
declaring rules, breaking them,
starting again like it mattered.

Across the lane,
boys shouted over a plastic ball,
bright, careless laughter
that didn’t belong to me.

I watched from the gate,
one hand curled around rusted iron,
feeling... strangely... 
that I had already stepped away.

Not lonely.
Just… elsewhere.

I wasn’t sad.
That’s the strange part.

Just aware...
in the way children sometimes are...
that I was standing slightly
to the left of my own life.

As if the world was larger
than this lane, this house, this evening,
and also somehow more broken
than anyone was saying out loud.

That one day
I would learn the weight of those silences,
how whole cities can disappear
between sentences on the news,

how people continue cooking dinner
while something far away
is ending.

And still...
the pump would groan,
the biscuits would crisp in oven,
the boys would shout over nothing.

That one day
I would leave this place
without ever quite leaving it,

carrying its quiet
like a second spine,
invisible, necessary,

and a question
I still haven’t answered:
whether I chose solitude,

or it chose me first.

And I would stand there,
already practicing
how to belong and not belong
at the same time.

~ Oizys.

Afternote: This poem comes from a place I didn’t fully understand as a child, where I was just watching, but not quite belonging; present, but already leaning away. Memory is rarely just memory. It carries what was visible and what wasn’t. Like the speaker in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Pittsylvania County,” I wasn’t envious of what I saw around me. If anything, I was aware, too early, perhaps, that life could unfold in ways I wasn’t sure I wanted. As a child, I didn’t have the language for what flickered through television screens or settled into the silences of adults. But I understood, in fragments, that the world extended beyond my courtyard in ways that were not always gentle. There was comfort in those evenings, yes. But also a quiet, persistent sense that the world was larger, stranger, and carrying things no one spoke about directly. This poem holds that contradiction: the ordinary rhythm of evening; tea, voices, play; and the faint, persistent awareness that elsewhere, something irreversible was unfolding. Looking back, I think that distance I felt wasn’t emptiness. It definitely was perceived as emptiness or hollowness by society. But, it was the beginning of attention, you know, the kind that doesn’t turn away, even when it doesn’t yet understand. I didn't know it then, and had innocently labelled it as a quality of a misfit but that distance I felt wasn't absence at all, rather it was recognition of a life both intimate and incomplete, of a world that extended far beyond what I could name, of a self already learning how to witness, before it could fully belong. I think this was one of the first times I recognized the shape of the person I might become: someone who stands slightly apart, noticing what slips through the cracks: both at home, and far beyond it.