NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 14] - the day after ai was dismantled

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 14]

Day Fourteen

Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome back for the fourteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. It’s hard to believe we’ve been at this for two weeks already but, well, we have!

Our featured participant for the day is Narrative Paralysis, where the response to Day Thirteen’s landscape prompt brings back to life the remembered ghost of that most characteristic of 1980s American landscapes — a suburban mall.

Today’s resource is the website of the Poetry Translation Centre, a U.K. nonprofit dedicated to making poetry from Asia, Latin America, and Africa available both in the original languages and in English. Many of the poems they present are accompaned by notes on the process of translation, including the specific choices that the translators made in rendering each poem into English.

And now for our (optional!) prompt. Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.

Happy writing!

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note: i really like this prompt, maureen. i tend to hoard ideas, waiting for a “perfect” time that never really arrives. so, i always have ideas for poems or pieces sitting around in my head. these prompts have been pushing me to write despite that, to show up with whatever i have left. to stop waiting and just begin. i’ve been meaning to write something about ai and writing for a while now. one of my current favourite poets, officialsadbeige, writes sharply about this... about détournement, algorithms, war, genocide, and the slow erosion of the human in all of it. sharing her here as my resource for today.

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the day after ai was dismantled

the day after ai was dismantled
i sat by the sea
and kept waiting
for language to come to me
already arranged

but the sea had no such habits

it wrote and erased
wrote and erased
with the same old hand
it had always used

around me
people still held their phones
like extinguished things
like gods gone out
but not yet cold

someone near me said
now we will have to make things ourselves

someone else laughed
the way people laugh
when they are frightened
of being left alone
with their own minds

i thought then
of all the words
i had handed over
on evenings when i was too tired
to reach myself

evenings with office-light still in my eyes
evenings when my head hurt
turmeric under my nails
the sink not yet empty
and the rice still had to be washed
and somebody still needed answering
my phone hot in my hand
my body already speaking
in the language of enough
and i had only enough self left
to outsource the sentence

it was never a god
only a tidy little servant
waiting for me
on the worst evenings
when i was too emptied out
to argue 
with it

all the little surrenders
made in the name of ease
all the neat machine-made bridges
laid over the difficult swamp
between feeling
and saying

and then i thought
of the cage waiting for me at home

not iron
not visible
nothing so dramatic

just routine
office tabs
deadlines
just the blue light of the laptop
the pressure cooker
unfinished dishes
domestic hours
messages needing replies
half-written drafts
missed calls from friends i abandoned years ago
work that follows you home
home that waits like work
the old discipline
of being useful
a body that must keep going
as if rest were bad character

even without ai
the cage remained

fluorescent
well managed
password protected

blessed be the locked screen
and the locked jaw
blessed be the women
answering everyone back

such was the prison:
efficient
lit from within
asking for nothing heroic
only your hours

the gulls were ruthless
real things usually are
they wanted food first
not metaphor, living things

the sea too
refused to help me beautifully
it smelled of salt and rot
and something metallic
it kept coughing up 
foam
plastic
and the same old noise
it was unhealingly repetitive

it kept returning
to the same damaged edge, eaten line
again and again
as if to say
this is what a body does
when it cannot stop
coming back

i sat there a long time
with my unwritten hands
thinking maybe the machine
was never the only prison

i have spent years
waiting to become the version of myself
who writes before exhaustion
who writes before dinner
before chores
before the body turns against the evening
but most days
i arrive to language late
asking it to take
whatever is left

thinking how easily
a woman is taught
to live behind glass
to stay reachable
pleasant
productive
grateful
and to call that a life
a woman is trained
to live in enclosures
to call them love
to call them family
to call them work
to call them duty
to call them coping
to call them keeping up
and call it being good
and call that goodness freedom

thinking how often
i have mistaken assistance
for rescue
i have mistaken obedience
for love
i have mistaken being easy to manage
for being loved

when i finally stood
nothing 
had been repaired
it was all still there
the human was still itself
the sea was still restless
the world still hungry
my life still waiting
with its small metal teeth

but for one brief hour
no voice had tried
to finish my sentence for me

the silence was not kind
but it was mine

and that too
felt like a kind of freedom

~ Oizys.