NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 13] - in my village, even the ground refuses me

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 13]

Day Thirteen

Here in the Land of Na/GloPoWriMo, the thirteenth day of the month isn’t ominous — not when it means another chance to write poems!

Today, our featured participant is verlie burroughs, who brings us a bittersweet response to Day Twelve’s memory-of-a-relative prompt.

Our resource for the day is the Poets House blog, where you’ll find tons of interviews with contemporary poets.

To get started with today’s prompt, first read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe. Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.

Happy writing!

-

in my village, even the ground refuses me

the soil doesn’t hold my footprint,
it loosens, as though i were never meant
to weigh upon it

the well water tastes like someone else’s name,
cool on the tongue,
but it will not answer when i call myself

the courtyard echoes, but not for me,
it returns a boy i have never been

my father walks differently here,
his voice bending at the edges,
as though some older mouth remembers it better

he is less a man
and more a son again

and my grandfather,

he sits in a forgetting that began before me,
his gaze passing through my body
like a wind that does not care for doors

he forgot me
before i could learn the grammar of his hands

so i too became forgettable

o place that claims me:
thou speakest in a blood i cannot hear

i press my ear to the earth,
but it hums with another lineage

and i;
unheld, unnamed, unreturned;

stand where i am from

and fail, still,
to arrive

as if arrival
were meant for someone else

the earth
not answering back
and does not arrive.

~ Oizys.

- 

note: i almost missed today. i started writing in the morning, right after the prompt arrived in my mail. but then work engulfed me, then sickness, then household chores, then more work, then cooking, then just… stress piling on. and now, after finally finishing my nightly rituals and tucking myself into bed, i realized my poem was still sitting there... half-done, probably infested with mosquitoes by now. so i picked it back up and finished it with whatever i had left in me. because i really don’t want to break the streak haha.