NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 9] - what the windowsill plant knows

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 9]

Day Nine

Happy ninth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month, all. We hope that you’re really getting into the groove of this whole poem-a-day thing!

Our featured participant today is Richard White, who brings us a poem about being (or not being) an EMT in reponse to Day Eight’s contradictory prompt.

Today’s resource is the Poetry Foundation’s collection of learning prompts, each one of which is geared toward introducing or exploring a different poetic form, mode, or concept, and then giving you a prompt to write from. If you just can’t get enough prompts, well, they’ve got a whole bunch more for you!

And that leads us to our own (optional) prompt for the day. Marianne Moore was a well-known modernist poet, with a curious taste in hats. Though she wrote on many themes, I’ve always had some affection for her many poems about – or in the voice of – animals, such as “The Fish,” “Dock Rats,” “The Pangolin,” and “No Swan so Fine.” Today, try writing your own poem in the voice of an animal or plant, or a poem that describes a specific animal or plant with references to historical events or scientific facts.

Happy writing!

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note: this prompt and my response poem feels like it arrives in continuity with yesterday’s. yesterday, i could not stop thinking about trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” a sentence obscene in its casual scale that was widely condemned for exactly the kind of monstrous ease it carried. by night, that sentence had already found its echo in more bombardment: israel striking over 100 sites in 10 minutes across lebanon, including beirut, with major civilian casualties.
i did not want to write this directly. so i let the poem speak through a windowsill plant. i wanted the window, the watering, the small domestic witness to carry it instead. sometimes the plant on the sill understands continuity better than the headline does. some forms of horror are too large to name plainly; they have to be seen in the way a hand waters something living while the air has already changed.

-

what the windowsill plant knows

i was not placed here for history.
i was placed here for light,
for the small obedient theatre
of leaf and morning.

for a chipped saucer.
for measured water.
for the hand that comes and goes
smelling faintly of soap, onion, ink.

still, i have lived long enough by this window
to know what glass cannot do.

it keeps out some rain.
it keeps in cooking smells.
it gathers fingerprints, dusk,
the fine democratic dust
that returns after every cleaning
like an old regime.

it does not keep out sentences.

last night one entered first:
creased, official, well-fed,
with the manners of a man
who has never had to carry water upstairs.

by morning the hand that watered me
was colder than the steel tumbler beside the sink.
the water tasted faintly
of tap-metal and unfinished dread.

i drank it anyway.
i drank what I was given. 
plants and women are praised for this.

that is what roots do.
they take what arrives.
they split quietly in the dark.
they move toward moisture
even when the soil has learned
the wrong kind of memory.

outside, the neighbourhood continued
with its full ordinary vulgarity.

someone beat a rug against a railing.
someone salted cucumber.
someone argued over coriander.
someone laughed from a balcony
with all their teeth.
a child dragged a schoolbag
like a small unwilling nation.

and elsewhere,
no, not elsewhere,
that is the lie that keeps the cupboards standing,
in this same stitched world,
the air was being taught new mathematics.

not thunder.
not monsoon.
not the sky losing its temper in the old familiar way.

something faster.
more counted.
so many impacts in so little breathing room
that even silence afterward
must have arrived in pieces.

i am only a plant, yes,
but do not mistake that for innocence.

i have watched tenants change,
paint peel,
women move kitchens from one rented room to another
without ever calling it exile.
i have watched collars come and go,
maps redrawn on television,
children rise against the same wall
until their heads nearly touched the calendar gods.

i know a little about surviving
by staying put.

botanists would tell you
leaves curl under stress
to save water.
stomata close
when the air turns hostile.
roots avoid rot
but seek moisture all the same.

how human,
to call this adaptation
instead of grief with instructions.

by noon i had turned myself
a little further toward the light.
not faith.
not hope.
plants are spared that humiliation.
just habit dressed as biology.
only the old reflex:
turn, open, endure.

the window kept making
its thin ridiculous promise.
the curtain moved once
like someone trying not to be seen.

inside, rice was rinsed.
tea was boiled.
a message arrived.
another was not answered.

i kept offering leaves
to a world that keeps confusing
appetite with permission.

and when evening came,
the hand returned again:
tired, thumb-lit,
still carrying the taste of the screen.

it touched one yellowing edge of me
as though checking
whether small things
were still alive.

i did not know how to tell it
that small things are always alive
at terrible times.

that is their punishment.
that is their science.

it touched one yellowing edge of me
as if to ask whether life
was still worth the trouble.

i had no answer.
i only kept turning
toward what had not yet finished
hurting me.

~ oizys.

afternote: i wish i had posted this earlier. i started writing in the morning, but the workday unraveled (no working keyboard, no easy alternative) and i got carried away in the rush of it all. slipping like this feels like a habit; once it starts, it’s too easy to keep missing, to keep putting things off. so i had to gently push myself, no, no, almost force my own hand, just to hit publish and comment it there. 

while going through the news yesterday, of threats, of bombing, a tiny and hollow bomb of nothing dropped on me: i received zero appraisal. i had been waiting, sincerely, for the new contract. part of me believed i would be met with something bright, something affirming, maybe an appraisal of flying colours; another part of me stayed cautious and controlled, remembering how it had been before, preparing for something meagre. and to all our surprises, it was nothing. 

and i find myself sitting and rotting with that absence, feeling it spread, slow and sour, all rancid, in my rock bottom.

i have been here, at this low, for longer than i want to admit. watching a world where violence keeps unfolding, where people die children slaughtered, where women are raped. and inside all that noise, this quiet, personal erasure lands and lingers. no lesson neatly tied up, no forced brightness. just this, as it is.