1st May 2026, after the village folds itself away

1st May, 2026. 08:10 PM.

Maureen has posted the final housekeeping note. Which means it is official now. April has been packed into boxes, the prompts have been swept from the floor, the links are still warm, the comment threads are still glowing faintly, and somewhere, thirty poems are lying around in my blog like guests who refused to leave before breakfast. Na/GloPoWriMo is over. Every year, this feels strange. For most of the year, my weblog is a quiet corner of the internet. A room with one chair, one flickering tube light, one stubborn spider, and me, rearranging my feelings badly. Then April comes. Suddenly, the room becomes a village. People arrive with their poems, their griefs, their jokes, their gods, their dead, their weather reports, their strange little mythical professions. Someone sets up a stall of metaphors. Someone brings a basket of crows. Someone arrives late with a mermaid. Someone is crying near the mangoes. Someone has misplaced a childhood and is filling out the correct form. For one month, we read each other. What a small sentence. What a large mercy. Thank you, Maureen, for building this temporary country every year. Thank you for the prompts, the resources, the patience, the housekeeping, the doors left open. And thank you to everyone who stopped by here, read, commented, left a line, carried a line away, or simply passed through quietly. You made this weird, little weblog less lonely. May has begun now. The village has not vanished exactly. It has only folded itself into pockets, bookmarks, drafts, names we will search for next year. And perhaps, before next April, I may wander into dVerse too! A poetry space Maggie (a fellow Na/GloPoWriMo poet!) kindly introduced me to. Maybe there will be other prompts, other doors, other rooms where words gather and refuse to behave. Until then, may poetry find us where we are hiding. See you next April.

08:50PM.

Also, because April has left me with too many names to lose, I have started a separate register on my Junkyard of Readees page: Fellow Na/GloPoWriMo Good Poetry Co-Citizens [as said by Maureen herself!]. A small roll call of poets, prompt-survivors, comment-leavers, line-barterers, and temporary neighbours from the April poetry village. Some read me. Some I read. Some left lamps in the comments. Some wrote poems I am still carrying. So I am keeping their names there, like pressed flowers, like forwarding addresses, like proof that the village happened. It is an ever-growing register, so I will keep adding names as I find them, remember them, and follow their little lanterns back through April.

~ Oizys.