NaPoWriMo 2026 [5th April] - What I Learned to Hate; What I Learned to Hear

NaPoWriMo 2026 [5th April]

Day Five 

Happy first Sunday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all!

Our featured participant today is Kim M. Russell, who brings us a stormy response to Day Four’s weather/season prompt.

Today, our resource is a brief history of the poetry chapbook, with digitized examples. It’s quite common for poets to publish one or more of these short, informal collections, often in very short runs, before they publish a more formal, “full-length” collection of poetry. And even quite well known poets may publish chapbooks as a means of showcasing shorter, cohesive groups of poems. If you’re interested in learning more about chapbooks, check out Bull City Press’s podcast series in which the press’s editors interview poets about their recently published chapbooks.

And now, here’s our prompt for the day — totally optional, as usual. The Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous two-line poem:

Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Here’s an English translation.

I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you ask?
I don’t know, but I feel it happening and am tortured.

I thought about this poem the other day when I read a social media post collecting sentences from Charles Darwin’s letters, including:

“Oh my God how do I hate species & varieties.”

“I am very tired, very stomachy & hate nearly the whole world.”

“I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”

“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees.”

“I am languid & bedeviled & hate writing & hate everybody.”

I must confess, the idea of being so grumpy that you have come to hate clover and bees is highly amusing to me. Today, your challenge is to take a page from Catullus and Darwin, and write a poem in which you talk about disliking something – particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.

Happy grumpy writing!
 
-

What I Learned to Hate; What I Learned to Hear

I hate ceiling fans.
The way they pretend to help
while doing nothing at all.

I hate spoons.
They arrive curved with expectation
asking me to hold things together
I never agreed to carry.

I hate clover.
Not for what it is,
but for how easily it survives
in places I could not.

I hate mornings.
Not because they come
but because they insist
on beginning again
as if nothing happened.

I hate bees.
Not for the sting,
but for how they move
with purpose.

As if the world
has already told them
what to become.

I have spent years
circling the same questions,
mistaking motion for meaning.

They make honey.

I make noise.

I hate the sound
of my mother’s bangles.

The way they announce her
before she enters,
a soft, inevitable warning.

They gather at her wrist
like small, obedient suns,
clinking against each other
as if they know their place.

I hate the sound
of my father’s footsteps.

Not loud,
never loud,
but certain.

A rhythm that did not ask
who was ready.

They moved through the house
like a decision already made,
like something closing in
without needing to run.

Between the two of them,

I learned early
how to listen for them

in echo and approach,
how to measure distance
in metal and movement.

How to quiet myself
before the sound reaches me.

Even now,
in rooms they have never entered,
I hear them:

faint
persistent
uninvited

the soft collision of glass,
the steady claim of ground.

Not loud enough
to be called a noise.

Not soft enough
to be forgotten.

Just enough
to remind me

that some sounds
do not leave.

~ Oizys.

-

Afternote: Wow, what a prompt for today. I almost regret coming to my desk and responding to this prompt so late. Sunday just slipped by. It was one of those heavy, humid days, broken only by a brief storm that didn’t quite cool anything down. Haha. Strangely, this prompt feels like an extension of my last night's diary entry. I picked up a zine I had been working on around this time last year, something I had convinced myself only Na/GloPoWriMo could push me to finish. The rest of that entry turned into a long, familiar spiral; me circling the same exhaustion with my own existence. So this prompt feels less like an exercise and more like a release. It perfectly scratches the itch of letting out the existential irritation. A place to let that irritation take shape over the small things, the absurd things, the things that shouldn’t matter but somehow do.