NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 18] - At the Governor’s Ball, the Second Daughter Refuses the Waltz

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 18]

Day Eighteen

Welcome back, everybody, for Day Eighteen of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is My Fresh Pages, which brings us an Emily Dickinson-inspired response to Day 17’s “favorite poem” prompt. I love the use of an automotive simile to describe the wren in the poem!

Today’s resource is the Faber Poetry Podcast. During its three seasons, the podcast’s presenters interviewed poets on issues ranging from fatherhood to ecology to teenage crushes.

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). When I was growing up, there was a book of poems in my house (I believe it was The Best Loved Poems of the American People) that was heavy on long, maudlin, narrative poems with lots and lots of rhyme – the sort of verse that used to be parodied on Bulwinkle’s Corner. As the twentieth century rolled in, poems like this were relegated to the status of stuff-schoolkids-were-forced-to-memorize, and they plummeted even further into our cultural memory-hole as learning poems by heart fell out of educational currency. But while some work in this style is extremely cringeworthy (I’m looking at you, “Bingen on the Rhine”), they can also be very fun to read. Take, for example, Sadakichi Hartmann’s “The Pirate,” or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” The action is dramatic, there’s lots of emotions, and the imagery is striking.

Today, we don’t challenge you to write all of a long, dramatic, narrative poem, but we invite you to try your hand at writing a poem that could be a section or piece of one. Include rhyme, include unlikely and dramatic scenes (maybe a poem about a bank robbery! Or an avalanche! Or Roman gladiators! Or an enormous ball held by mermaids, where there is an undercurrent (hee) of palace intrigue!) Basically, a poem with the plot of an opera (evil twins! Egyptian tombs! Star-crossed lovers! Tigers for no apparent reason!)

Happy writing!

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At the Governor’s Ball, the Second Daughter Refuses the Waltz

They lit the palace like a wound in gold,
each chandelier a disciplined sun,
and all the women entered, bright and cold,
as if obedience could be outdone.

The musicians tuned their small and silver knives.
The floor shone back whatever it was shown.
The men arrived accompanied by wives,
or titles, which are much the same in tone.

I wore the family rubies at my throat,
those patient drops inherited through fear;
my mother pinned them on me like a note
that said: be good. be still. be wanted here.

Across the hall, beneath the painted dome
where cherubs looked suspiciously well-fed,
my sister moved as if the room were home,
as if no woman ever learned to dread

the careful theatre of being seen,
the curtsey like a hinge, the smile a lock,
the way a girl is polished to a sheen
and set among the crystal and the clock.

Outside, the horses stamped against the frost.
Inside, the powdered courtiers drank and lied.
A duke laughed loudly over what was lost
that year in war, as though men’s sons had died

for something noble, something clean and starred,
not maps redrawn by fingers fat with rings.
The generals spoke of sacrifice. How hard
it is, they said, to govern living things.

And then the doors flew open. Not with grace.
Not with announcement. Not with measured art.
The wind came first and struck the room’s white face.
The candles leaned as if they had a heart.

Behind it came the rider, mud to knee,
his horse all foam, his mouth a ruined bell:
the southern gate is ash. the granary
is gone. the watchmen burned. the governor fell.

I heard it passed between the servants first—
not news, but number: sixty million, low,
as if the mouth must learn to carry worst
things softly, so the upper rooms won’t know.

No one moved first. That is the old design.
Catastrophe must wait its turn in silk.
A lady dropped her fan. A glass of wine
tilted and bled itself into the milk-

pale tablecloth. The musicians stood
with bows suspended over their small crimes.
I thought: so this is how they say the flood
arrives—between two very proper rhymes.

My sister’s hand found mine beneath the lace.
For one strange moment neither of us bowed.
The room looked smaller than my mother’s face.
The men looked softer saying not aloud

what every woman there had always known:
that power is a costume stitched by need,
that every throne is only borrowed bone,
that fire can also be a form of read-

ing, yes, a way of moving through a lie,
of sounding out the weak place in the wall.
The rider swayed. The orchestra went dry.
Somewhere below us servants heard it all

and kept on carrying the sugared trays,
the lamb, the figs, the cream, the sugared pears.
This is the way the world survives its blaze:
someone still folds the napkins, mends the tears.

The duke said, Lock the gates. The bishop, Pray.
My mother whispered, Child, adjust your glove.
My sister laughed then, not in a pretty way,
but like a woman done confusing love

with being handled. Done with being neat.
Done with mistaking silence for good breeding.
She stepped into the middle of the heat
where all the candles shook with sudden reading.

No, she said. Only that. A little word.
A sparrow-word. A word to fit the mouth.
And yet the whole ridiculous room heard
the hinge snap open somewhere in the south.

Then all at once the windows seemed too thin.
The gilded mirrors lost their appetite.
The music, which had waited to begin,
lay on the air like something not quite right.

I took the rubies from my obedient throat.
They left a row of small and cooling marks.
My mother looked at me as at a boat
unfastening itself from family darks.

We did not run. It was more grave than that.
We walked, as women do when watched by men,
through broken light, through scandal, silk, and chat,
past portraits who would not survive till ten.

Behind us rose the old, astonished noise
of men discovering history has teeth.
Ahead: the courtyard, horses, frost, and choice,
and somewhere under all of it, beneath

the ash, the smoke, the law, the family name,
the smaller life they had prepared for each:
a gate ungoverned now by fear or shame,
a night enormous and not out of reach.

So let them keep the ballroom and the throne,
the chandelier, the treaties, and the dove.
I have seen empires tremble at one tone
too plain for flattery, too bare for love.

And if by morning all of this is lost—
the palace, title, ruby, waltz, and wall—
still let it first be written: at the frost-
lit hour of fire, we did not dance at all.

~ Oizys.

Note: Today’s prompt wanted drama, rhyme, and something with the plot of an opera, which is frankly dangerous to hand to someone already preoccupied with rooms, power, and women being arranged decoratively. So naturally I ended up with a ballroom, a small rebellion, and the usual trouble with inheritance. Apparently even when I try to write theatrically, I still write about hierarchy in a dress.