NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 10] - What the emptied cup says

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 10]

Day Ten

One-third of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo already?! I guess the days go by fast when you spend them writing poems.

Our featured participant for the day is Poems by Sidra, where you’ll find that the response to Day Nine’s Marianne-Moore-inspired prompt brings us not only a poem in the voice of an animal, but a lovely and surprising opening simile.

Today’s daily resource is The Poetry Project‘s Youtube channel, where you can find videos of various readings, including the Project’s famous New Year’s Day poetry marathons.

And now, our (optional) daily prompt. In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

Happy (or at least meaningful) writing!

-

What the emptied cup says

By evening
the cup on the sill
had cooled into itself,
holding the last of the light
like something rationed.

Outside, a siren
rose and fell somewhere far enough
to be called elsewhere,
which is how ruin travels now —
first by headline, then by weather,
then by the way your hand hesitates
over ordinary things.

What did it keep?
The print of a mouth.
What did it keep?
A ring the colour of old tea,
thin as a border drawn by someone
who would never have to cross it.
What did it keep?
The habit of waiting
after the drinking was done.

I washed it gently,
as if gentleness still counted for something,
as if the water running clear
meant anything could be.

In the next building
someone was watering basil
with the concentration of prayer.
Someone somewhere still folded laundry.
Someone somewhere still unpinned
a child’s shirt from a line.
And somewhere else
dust entered a house
through the place a wall had been.

The cup said nothing.
That was the worst part.
How well it held
its small domestic shape.
How beautifully it assisted
the fiction of safety.

Even empty,
it stood there
with the obedience of an object
made to survive a table.

And I, who had only lifted it,
felt in my hand
that strange modern shame
to be alive in a room with running water,
to be grieving nothing singular,
only this vast, managed breaking
that keeps arriving
through the least defended doors.
And I, who had only lifted it,
felt in my hand
that sickening nearness
to all I had not paid for
the false comfort of being spared
how safety survives by enclosure
the quiet complicity of an intact room:
(how easily safety arranges itself
as habit, as furniture, as fact)
the lie of being untouched,
the lie of being separate,
as if safety were ever anything
but a partition held in place
by someone else’s exposure.

The cup stood still.
I did not.

Somewhere the night kept entering houses.
Somewhere names were being carried
across water, across wires, across breath.
And here, even here,
the task was not to be innocent
but to refuse the ease
of staying useless.

Guilt is only another vessel
if it sits too long.
Another thing that holds and holds
and does not pour.

So I set the cup down carefully,
as one might set down a lie
that has been useful for too many years.

~ Oizys.

Afternote: I keep returning to Mimi Kim’s reminder that: These movements also challenge the primacy of individual safety, noting that for oppressed people, the possibility of individual safety is a myth or a luxury afforded to the privileged few. The goal, rather, is liberation and can only be achieved through a collective struggle towards the radical transformation of the material conditions contributing to violence on all of its levels.

I think shame and guilt often arise when we begin to recognise our proximity to power, or our complicity within what feels like a fiction of safety. But the task is not to let that shame fester, or to mistake guilt for action. Left to sit too long, both can become static, self-enclosed, even indulgent. What matters is transforming that recognition into resistance, because our proximity to power can also be the first site of solidarity.

As Dr Nat Raha and Dr Mijke van der Drift suggest, Being open to acknowledging such complicities in these moments is a starting point for addressing difficult tensions – they are not solved simply by an analysis of social hierarchy (even if that can play a role) or by attributions of innocence and guilt. The latter are unhelpful elements in the emotional sensorium. 

What matters more is what recognition asks of us, and what we do next.