Rage, reverie, and 30 almost-poems later

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (May 1st: That's all, Folks!): Well, we’ve done it again. Another National/Global Poetry Writing Month is in the books.

Our final featured participant for 2025 is grapeling, whose “askew” response to Day 30’s “songs-that-follow-you” prompt is a kind and keen reminder that there’s more than one way to experience to world.

Thanks to everyone who took up the challenge this year! We hope you enjoyed the prompts, the art/resources, and especially the community that has grown up around Na/GloPoWriMo. Speaking of that community, we extend a special shout-out for everyone who cheered along in the daily comment sections. It’s really heartwarming to see returning the same names/faces every year, and how actively and kindly you respond to each other’s work, help newbies out with questions, and create a supportive online microcosm for poetry every April.

As usual, all the prompts and posts will remain available, and the list of participating sites will stay up through early next year, when we’ll begin the house-cleaning in preparation for Na/GloPoWriMo 2026.

Thanks again, and see you next year!

Rage, reverie, and 30 almost-poems later

I can’t believe it’s over, again. This year felt like walking through fire in slow motion. I came in with so much hope, dipped early, caught up, almost quit, almost vanished, and still somehow dragged myself across the finish line with a tattered notebook, too many tabs open, and poetry leaking out of my pores like fever-sweat.

And this wasn’t even the poetic, noble kind of struggle. It was real-life mess. Rage migraines. Events I didn’t want to attend. Rooms I had to perform (my existence) in. Screens I stared at until the words blurred. Some days I was too drained to write full poems, so I dropped skeletons and breadcrumbs in my notebook or drafts and convinced myself I’d dress them later. Some I never did. Some got stitched together at 2 AM in a haze of panic, pride, and way too much tea. Some cramped up under blanket on my mobile phone (like this one, haha!). But I didn’t stop. I wanted to. Oh god, I wanted to. But I didn’t.

Thank you to everyone who read, commented, wandered into my wild metaphors, and let me be feral and sentimental and stubbornly verbose. I wrote on my phone, half-asleep, mid-chaos, in trains of thought that derailed mid-track and still, I made it to the end. That’s something. Maybe not everything, but something sacred.

To Maureen and the NaPoWriMo, thank you, deeply, for building this peculiar, beautiful yearly lighthouse. I don’t know how many poems I’ll keep. I don’t know how many I’ll burn. But I do know I’ll be back. I always am. Year after year, April becomes a strange, intimate kind of survival and somehow, you all make it worth returning to.

And somewhere in between all that quiet unraveling and screaming into drafts, I got featured. For the first time. That stunned little moment of recognition, like being handed a candle mid-storm, meant more than I know how to say without turning it into another poem. I wrote through sickness, noise, weddings I didn’t want to attend, rooms I didn’t want to be in, silences I didn’t want to carry. And still: I wrote. I feel like I have learnt the lesson of keeping going.

Also, confession (I have already mentioned this under the last poem, but I am reiterating): part of me didn’t post the last poem for hours because I didn’t want it to end. I kept staring at it, tweaking commas that didn’t matter, delaying the inevitable. Endings are hard. I’m someone who holds onto tabs for years. Who doesn’t return library books just to avoid saying goodbye. This felt like one of those tabs. One I didn’t want to close because closing means leaving. And I hate that. So this long-winded post? Maybe it’s me keeping the tab open just a little longer.

See you in the margins next time. Or in the dust of old prompt pages. Or maybe how ghosts return—quiet at first, then undeniable.

(P.S. If anyone’s curious (and I am sure many of you know this), I’ve all my poems + chaos on my weblog Chronicles of Miss Miseria: a corner of the internet where I’m usually weirder, wordier, and sometimes on fire or drowning deep in a river of regrets and rumination. Come visit, haunt the comments, or just read in the shadows. I’ll probably still be writing there long after April forgets me. Long after this, everything around me that picks my wounds and injures my will, this perishes. Because, I have learnt the lesson of keeping going.)

(P.P.S. AGAIN. I know, I know. This is wildly sappy for a poetry challenge. But what can I say? I’m an April softie wrapped in rage and lowercase feelings.)

(P.P.P.S. To the version of me who almost gave up halfway through: I’m glad you didn’t. To the one who almost gave up every single day after that? Same.)

tl;dr:

Still here, still writing, still a mess (thank god). The month that tried to swallow me (but I wrote back). How to survive April by giving a slow-burning goodbye in May. A bag of poetry, delirium, and the ghosts of almost-quits. NaPoWriMo, you beast, we’ll be back. This isn’t an ending, it’s a tab I refuse to close.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 30th): She Who Burned Beautifully

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Thirty): Wow, we made it, everyone! Today’s the final day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. We hope you make it to the end of the day with thirty new poems under your belt. But even if you didn’t manage to keep up with the whole poem-a-day thing, we hope you had fun!

We’ll be back tomorrow with our final featured participant and some closing thoughts for the year’s challenge, but in the meantime, our featured participant for today is Catching Lines, who brings us an elegy for Janis Joplin in response to Day 29’s inspired-by-the-music-makers prompt.

Our final resource is MatterPort Discover, a site that lets you take virtual tours of all kinds of museums, ranging from the National Museum of Ireland to the Bicycle Museum of America.

Finally, here’s the last prompt of this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo (optional, as always)! In his meandering poem, “Grateful Dead Tapes,” poet Ed Skoog riffs on the eponymous tapes that he’s found in a secondhand store, remembering various instances of hearing the band, both live and in recording. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that also describes different times in which you’ve heard the same band or piece of music across your lifetime.

Happy writing!

Note: I almost gave up. And I tried my best to wrap this up without giving up this year. I will always come back to this.

She Who Burned Beautifully

(for the songs that found me when no one else did)

Oizys, mother of the sharpest silences: hear me now.

They played that song again—

the one that howls like a woman unspooling her bones

on marble floors too clean for grief.

I was thirteen, and I screamed.

At him.

At the godfather of my silence.

At the man who carved his name in thunder

and called it parenting.

That day, I tore through the wallpaper of obedience,

raised my voice like a temple bell,

and the song rose with me.

War drums.

Chords like broken bangles.

A voice that wasn’t mine but knew my rage

like a sister.

Years later, locked away in velvet cages

stitched with gold and expectations,

I escaped.

Not with a suitcase—no,

with nothing but a name on my tongue

that meant sorrow and sovereignty:

Oizys.

I walked through strange cities

where no one knew how to pronounce me,

but I played that same song,

a siren of survival,

and the walls of every hotel room shivered

as I danced like a girl unchained

but still carrying her rusted manacles in her purse

like relics.

The air smelled of cardamom and gasoline. My wrists still bore the red threads of home.

The third time I heard it,

I was on the floor of my own apartment,

cold tea beside me,

achievement collapsing like a palace made of sugar.

I whispered:

“I am not capable.”

The song didn’t disagree.

It hummed around me, ancient and cruel,

as if to say—

“Then be incapable.

But burn anyway.”

“Even broken things can echo,” she sang,

and I believed her, for once.

Now when it plays,

I don’t cry.

I open my wrists—not with blades—

but with bracelets of fire,

the kind only a woman forged in rage and ruin can wear.

I sing back.

I sing back, with rusted manacles now melted into melody.

And somewhere,

the gods of HeeraMandi nod from their carved balconies,

their silks stained with blood and rosewater,

knowing I’ve earned my own music.

- Oizys.

Another Note: Things have been difficult recently. I started the challenge with a lot of hope; actually kickstarted early. But once April began, I fell behind a bit. Still, I kept writing bits and pieces for the prompts, thinking I’d post them here and there, eventually. And I did. I found time, caught up, and kept going. And… I got featured. For the first time. Woah. Towards the end, though, things got heavier. More chaos. More anger. More sickness. More weddings (bad…?). More exploitation. More hurt. More loneliness. More humiliation. Just more difficult days. But I stayed. I posted. Even though, near the end, I kept feeling like giving up. Even the second last day, I posted that one quite late. And today’s April 30th prompt too. I didn’t want to give up so easily.

But part of me kept putting it off. Stubborn. Delaying and delaying, maybe because another part didn’t want this to end. That’s always been me: delaying or ignoring endings because I’m scared to confront them. I procrastinate until regret starts swelling in my bones. But this time, I tried. I tried to fight through the pain, through the restraining thoughts and I posted.

Had to write it on mobile. Haha. Not my usual style. Mostly, I do it with my laptop, some randomly old notebooks, a book or two and a pen.

But to win a battle, you do what you have to. I think I’ll always come back to this. That fight—the internal one—was the root of this poem. This month, I stuck to every theme, every prompt, went beyond and above just to hold on to it. But this final one: I took it purely as inspiration. I poured my conflict into it. Let the rage shape it. Let my sorrow speak. And I wrote it. I’ll always come back to this. A flag point. A fire I lit. And proof that even when I thought I couldn't (perfectly)—I did (even if not perfectly).

P.S.: Yeah, I know—it’s all very dramatic and sappy for just a yearly NaPoWriMo post. But hey, when you live inside your head 24/7, even poetry becomes a war diary. Let me have this one.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 29th): The Woman Who Chose Absence

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Nine): Happy Tuesday, all, and happy penultimate day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Adil Akbar, whose response to Day 28’s “music and ceremonies” prompt rather reminds us of César Vallejo.

Today’s daily resource is the online galleries of the Whitney Museum, where you’ll find artwork as varied as this fun portrait of Billie Jean King, a Frank Stella sculpture that looks like what would happen if a space station fell in love with a bridge, and this contemporary take on the classic embroidered sampler.

And now for today’s prompt – optional as always. Just as poetry is made by poets, music is made by musicians. There is always a living being behind the words, the rhythm, and at the heart of every song. Just as music and poetry can fascinate in their own right, so do the personalities behind every form of art. In her poem, “Canary,” Rita Dove riffs on Billie Holiday, and how her life has been spun into myth. Likewise, in “Ode for Donny Hathaway,” Wanda Coleman muses on another tragic figure, in the form of the eponymous soul singer and keyboardist.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that takes its inspiration from the life of a musician, poet, or other artist. And while our example poems are squarely elegiac, don’t feel limited to minor-key feelings in your own work.

Happy (?) writing!

NOTE: I am so late I almost forgot about this, and there was a storm, so I fell asleep like a baby and woke up in the middle of the night to write for this prompt, and got distracted for a couple of hours arranging some hundred random links and messages. So, I am absolutely delirious right now. I’ve twisted this prompt into a deliciously conspiratorial one. I’m going to take a writer/poet who’s used a pseudonym (someone cryptic, semi-anonymous, hiding in plain sight, but never known) and from there, build a fictional "real self" behind the mask of their persona. Kind of Paul Auster meets Roberto Bolaño, a bit of postmodern noir with poetic ruin scrawled into the margins.

BACKDROP: 

Inspiration: Elena Ferrante (Italy)

We still don’t really know who Ferrante is. Yes, journalists have made various claims, even using financial records and real estate deeds to try and "out" her, but Ferrante, the author of the Neapolitan Novels, has insisted that the anonymity is part of the work. She writes in Italian, but her voice is global, intimate, and terrifyingly raw. She embodies womanhood, class struggle, memory, and creative obsession with such eerie precision that it feels lived like a diary whispered into an attic floorboard. So now… let’s do what the world doesn’t know. I will be unearthing a dossier lost in the Vatican’s forbidden archives or smuggled out of some smoky Milanese literary salon.

• Name: Rafaella di Lupo
• Born: March 17, 1949
• Birthplace: Oliveto Lucano, a nowhere village where wolves outnumber buses.
• Occupation: Midwife by day, illegal bookseller by night.
• Education: Taught to read by a nun who carved quotes from Dante into tree bark.
• Wrote her first novel in goat’s blood and blackberry ink (revised later with a biro).
• Never married, not out of principle but forgetfulness.
• Favorite word: estraneo (stranger).
• Believes literature is an exorcism, not entertainment.
• Theory: She lives in a crumbling house built into a cliffside. Her manuscripts are mailed via a boy who doesn’t speak. She’s got a wall covered in torn-apart pages of Simone Weil, Lucia Berlin, and Rimbaud. Each character she writes is a person she tried, and failed, to become.
• Status: Active. Undocumented. Believed to be a non-person under Italian citizenship records post-1977.
• Last Seen: Leaving the port of Salerno in 1989, wrapped in a shawl stitched with marginalia.
• Only writes between 3:12 a.m. and 4:01 a.m., convinced that’s when memory is most porous and shame is still half-asleep.
• Considers all novels to be confessionals, but lies constantly—especially when telling the truth.
• Sends edits to her translator on torn scraps of brown butcher paper. Each one ends with the same phrase: “Burn after meaning.”
• The Apartment on Via delle Ombre: An address without a buzzer. Inside, stacks of books double as furniture. The walls are hand-painted with notes from a diary she insists she didn’t write. On the kitchen table:
• One fountain pen.
• A teacup full of red wine.
• A playing card with the queen’s face scratched out.
• A letter from someone named “Lenù” that ends: “You wrote me into being, and then you left me here. I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine.”
• Rumors & Red Threads:
• In the 70s, she was rumored to have translated Ingeborg Bachmann under a pseudonym which later disappeared from the publisher’s catalogue.
• She once mailed a manuscript soaked in sea salt and bundled in fishing net. When opened, every third word was smeared—readers described it as “the most emotionally accurate censorship of grief.”
• Her handwriting allegedly resembles that of three separate literary women, now dead, all unrelated. A coincidence? Or a composite ghost?
• Hidden Bibliography: 
• The Silence of Garlic (1975): a novella allegedly about cooking, but actually about sexual shame and Catholic repression.
• Figlia Della Neve (“Daughter of Snow”): unpublished, rumored to exist only in oral form, passed between women who meet in candlelit libraries once a decade.
• The Left Side of the Bed: poems so elliptical and cryptic they’ve been banned in Naples for “inducing familial unrest.”
• Final Truth (or Lie?): There is no Ferrante. There never was. There was only the woman who chose absence louder than presence and in that absence, we all found a mirror.

The Woman Who Chose Absence

{Inspired by the invented secret identity behind the pseudonym 'Elena Ferrante' — Rafaella di Lupo, the woman who chose absence over fame.}

In Oliveto Lucano, where the wolves sang first,
she was born; not wept for, but noted,
like a comma in the parish ledger.

By day, she pulled screaming souls from the screaming dark.
By night, she stitched forbidden words into the hems of her skirts.
The villagers said the wind in the cliffs spelled her name,
but they never agreed on the spelling.

At 3:12 a.m., while the shame still slept,
she dipped her pen in blackberry blood,
writing not stories,
but exorcisms,
each word a scream swallowed inside a stranger’s throat.

Her manuscripts sailed from her cliffside —
carried by a boy who had no tongue,
wrapped in butcher paper that smelled of salt,
marked with a warning:

Burn after meaning.

No portrait remains. Only furniture made of books.
Only a teacup that never spills.
Only a letter, unsigned, reading:

"You wrote me into being.
You left me in the mirror.
I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine."

Some say she dissolved into salt spray.
Some say she inked herself into disappearance.
Some say Ferrante is a myth we made,
when we needed a woman to blame
for telling the truth so beautifully
we wanted her dead for it.

- Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 28th): When the Drums Wept

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Eight): Welcome back, all. As of today, there’s just three days left in this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today, our featured participant is Mariyah, who brings us a poignant take on Modigliani portrait in response to Day 27’s painting-based prompt.

Today’s daily resource is El Museo del Barrio, a New York City museum focused on the experience of Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans in the United States. The museum’s website provides highlights from its permanent collection, as well videos exploring the art and artists featured.

Last but not least, here is today’s prompt (optional, as always). Music features heavily in human rituals and celebrations. We play music at parties; we play it in parades, and at weddings. In her poem, OBIT [Music], Victoria Chang describes the role that music played in her mother’s funeral. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that involves music at a ceremony or event of some kind.

Happy, or at the very least, meaningful, writing!

When the Drums Wept

In the crumbling church by the mango tree,
the drums began before the priest could speak.
They beat the drums in mockery of the old oaths,
each strike a curse hurled at an almost-forgotten dictator.
Not an organ, not a hymn,
but a pulse, fierce and rib-shaking,
a heartbeat the sky itself leaned in to hear.

Grandmother clutched her beads,
her hands trembling like old paper.
She spat once into the dust,
a blessing or a curse, no one could tell.

The crows on the steeple bowed their heads,
and the wind stitched shut its traitor’s mouth.

Torches bloomed among the ruins,
and the smoke braided itself into the stars.
Wild vines clutched the broken stone,
spelling prayers in a language older than stories.

Music: raw, ruthless;
spilled out into the courtyard like black oil,
slicking the steps, the flowers, the open graves.
It was a funeral, yes,
but it was also an uprising.
A remembering.
A reminder.
A refusal.

The children tore down the tattered banners,
scattering ashes over polished graves,
beating the drums until their palms tore,
laughing the way prisoners laugh when the gates fall.

The dead listened.
The living danced.
And no one,
no one:
Bowed.

They danced not for the gods,
but against them.

They tore the gold crosses from the crumbled altar,
hammered their fists against the tombstones
until the stone wept dust.

They spat verses backward,
draped broken banners over the priest’s abandoned robes,
and danced on the bones of kings.

Not to the priest,
not to the polished marble tombs,
not to the faded flags in the rafters.

Because in that moment,
every ache, every stolen hymn, every broken promise,
was dragged into the open and made to bleed.

And when the music finally died,
when the last drum split its skin with one exhausted sigh,
it was not silence that followed.
It was the birth of a future they had been denied.

The crows took flight.
The earth sighed open.
And from the wreck of the old temple,
something unholy and beautiful
clawed and crowned with rust,
began to grow,
writhing its way upward like a fierce garden,
thorned with old prayers,
howling its name in a tongue no priest could bless.

- Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 27th): Nothing endures but the whim of the breeze

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Seven): Happy Sunday, everyone. I hope you find it to be a relaxing and inspiring day for writing poems.

Our featured participant for the day is Hayaathi – Goddess of Sehnsucht, whose first attempt at a sonnet brings a lovely blend of grief and self-deprecating humor.

Today’s daily resource is the online collection of the Harvard Art Museums, where you can find this bright and pretty drawing of a tulip poplar, a rather forbidding poster comparing various causes of death in Wisconsin, this beautiful jade paperweight, and much more.

And now for today’s optional prompt. W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” takes its inspiration from a very particular painting: Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that describes a detail in a  painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement.

Happy writing!

Nothing endures but the whim of the breeze

The kingdoms of men crumble faster than a clover’s sigh.
In the painting, a man is tied to the cannon's yawning mouth —
forgotten now by the breeze that carries away screams like pollen.

Even walls remember our names.
In the corner, a boy stoops, unnoticed,
Plucking a single dandelion from the mud,
While armies sharpen swords nearby, deaf to the golden hush.
A peeling mural on a battered building
whispers of those who leaned and laughed here.

Empires may forget, but paint remembers where we leaned.

Hidden now by ivy:
a gold mine of raw, explosive, burning material,
laughing where no one sees.

Beneath the crumbling sunburst, a corner:
Two children, handprints smeared in blue,

History is carved by calloused hands:
a hammer, an exhausted eye, a soot-stained shirt button.

Walls crumble faster than promises:
a tiny kiss, cracked barbed wire, broken slogans.

Roots run deeper than exile:
a single corn stalk, a hummingbird, a mother’s weary glance.

Peace is the sharpest blade:
a child peeking from behind riot shields.

Dreams are stitched in daylight:
someone sewing a quilt, a window left ajar.

Color blooms where concrete crushes:
a tiny slingshot tucked into a belt.

Earth keeps the receipts of betrayal:
a river spirit hidden in a swirl, a cracked feather.

In the earth’s bitter marrow:
an arsenal of raw, explosive, burning roots,
a gold mine buried in betrayal.

Because political is personal.
It’s not some distant, sterile thing happening in suits and marble rooms:
It’s your grandmother’s missing land.
It’s the factory smoke in your lungs.
It’s the job you didn’t get because of your name.
It’s how your body is read (or misread) walking down the street.
It’s the mural you paint because you were never meant to survive,
the temple you build from broken, stained glass,
the arsenal hidden under the cobblestones.

History chews up its bravest children.
A lone sneaker dangles from a power line,
paint dripping down like blood.
I once wore shoes just like that,
running from a future sharpening knives for me,
running from a fate already closing its fists.

But tomorrow, barefoot, I will plant myself deeper, braver.

Empires die of amnesia.
No flag remembers the hands that sewed it.
On the mural’s cracked belly, a boy
traces his own face:
brown, wide-eyed, defiant:
beside the bullet holes they forgot to paint over.

He smiles like a sunrise they can't bomb away.
It was always political because it was always personal.

- Oizys.

Note: This poem was born from Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1884 painting, "Blowing from Guns in British India," which depicts the execution of Namdhari Sikhs by British colonial forces in 1872. In the scene, a man is tied to a cannon, seconds away from a death so brutal it was meant to be both punishment and spectacle. The silence was visible not in faces, but in posture, in the way soldiers stood, in the way the crowd blurred at the edges, anonymous and unmoving. I kept thinking how history doesn’t only survive in the monuments of the victors. It lives in the quiet places too: a child's handprint under ivy, a forgotten mural on a crumbling wall, a slingshot tucked into a belt. This poem is a small act of remembrance for the unnamed, the unnoticed, the ones the breeze could never quite erase.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 26th): Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Six): We finally made it to the weekend, everyone! 

Today’s featured participant is Eden Ligon, whose “live concert” poem for Day Twenty-Five shows all the sweetness of music that has ripened with time.

Our daily resource is the online collection of Spain’s Reina Sofia Museum, which houses an incredible collection of modern and contemporary art. You can find Picassos aplenty here, of course, but also things like this vertiginous sculpture that makes me think of a rollercoaster, this mysterious Magritte, and this collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And now for our daily (optional) prompt. The word “sonnet” comes directly from the Italian sonetto, or “little song.” A traditional sonnet has a strict meter and rhyme scheme. It’s a strange form to have wormed its way into English, which is relatively unmetrical and rhyme-poor compared to Romance languages like Italian.

But thanks to William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and others, the sonnet in English bloomed. It also became a sort of rite of passage for poets, with the Victorians especially loving very strict sonnets.

To refresh you on the “rules” of the traditional sonnet:

• 14 lines
• 10 syllables per line
• Those syllables are divided into five iambic feet. (An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word “admit” is a good example. In pronouncing it, you put more stress on the “mit” than the “ad.”
• Rhyme schemes vary, but the Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg (three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet).
• Sonnets are often thought of as not just little songs, but little essays, with the first six-to-eight or so lines building up a problem, the next four-to-six discussing it, and the last two-to-four coming to a conclusion.
• Given all these rules, it’s perhaps surprising that love poems make up quite a chunk of sonnets in English, but maybe that’s just because love poems make up quite a chunk of all poems in English?

If you want to intimidate yourself about poetry in general and sonnets in particular, read this quote from Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody.

To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and very strict ones of space; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully; these are the four great requirements of the poet in general; but they are never set so clearly, so imperatively, so urgently before any variety of poet as before the sonneteer.

And now, by way of illustration, let’s take a look at a few contemporary takes on the sonnet. The first, by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a pretty strict traditional sonnet. The next two –by Terrence Hayes and Alice Notley – are looser. And finally, the last one, by June Jordan, is a rather strict sonnet (rhyme- and meter-wise, though somewhat looser in line-specific syllable count) that doesn’t sound strict at all. It is joyfully informal in its language and tone.

After all this, here’s your prompt! Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something “sonnet-shaped.” Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want.

Happy writing!

Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

They clad us in silk, but stitched us in chains,
Our laughter bought with blood, our songs with sighs,
We wore their pleasures like embroidered stains,
A garden caged beneath a painted sky.

You crowned our throats with coins, not diadems,
Fed hunger with illusions of a throne,
Yet we, who danced within your stratagems,
Bent music till the very walls were stone.

No master's hand shall write our epitaph,
No borrowed tool shall build our freedom's flight,
We are the storm, the silence, and the laugh,
We break — we burn — we blaze — we birth — we fight.

Each daughter bears a hammer in her breast;
We raze your house to raise our own red crest.

- Oizys,
(The Sonneteeress)
[Since I learned the word "sonneteer" today. Please don't kill me. I won't use it again. Ha, ha.]

Note: This poem maintains the traditional sonnet structure: 14 lines with approximately 10 syllables each organized into three quatrains and a final couplet. It follows the Shakespearean rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg). In my poem, the "E" rhymes (epitaph and laugh), are not perfect. They form a slant/near rhyme, which is common and accepted in English poetry. As for the iambic pentameter, I tried my best. Then I laughed and gave up! So now: Accuracy in iambic pentameter is about flow, not perfection. We honor the spirit of the meter, not enslave ourselves to it. Just like Lorde said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." By breaking a few rules, I am actually adhering more closely to the theme of my poem: rebellion, reinvention, and radical self-construction (tool by tool, step by step).

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 25th): Internal Concert {on hearing “labour” by Paris Paloma}

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty-Five): Happy final Friday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all.

Today’s featured participant is: [blank, Maureen?] Edited to add Maureen's edit: With apologies for the delay (I’m traveling, and just plain fell asleep last night before updating today’s post!), today’s featured participant is Wren Jones, who brings us a flashback to Springsteen in response to Day Twenty-Four’s making-music-together prompt.

Our daily resource is the online galleries of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, one of India’s foremost museums. It’s a pleasure to browse through the images here. I particularly liked these anklets that aren’t just jewelry but a sort of personal piggy bank, this portrait of the fabulously mustachioed J.M. Cursetjee, and this highly decorative flask, originally meant to hold gunpowder!

Finally, here is our optional prompt for the day. In her poem, senzo, Evie Shockley recounts the experience of being at a live concert, relating it the act of writing poetry. Today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music, and tells how it moves you. It could be a Rolling Stones concert, your little sister’s middle school musical, or just someone whistling – it just needs to be something meaningful to you.

Happy writing!

Some rambling: I’m on a sort-of-standby at work today, so I have some free time. My mother is already tired, and I’m sitting beside her as she snores softly. The sun is scorching outside. Our room is dark, shrouded by my makeshift curtains; her sarees pinned up to keep the heat from spilling in. Being from a small town, I’ve never been to a concert. Nobody comes here. But then again, if I were in a big one, would I even go? Probably not. I’d combust—figuratively speaking, of course. So when NaPoWriMo asked us to write about a live music experience, I hesitated. I’ve never stood in a crowd, never swayed to a stage light, never lost my voice screaming lyrics in unison. But I have sat alone in a room, headphones in, heart splitting open—completely undone by a song. “labour” by Paris Paloma did that to me. It wasn’t a concert in the traditional sense. It was something more intimate. More ancestral. A reckoning, a remembrance, a resurrection. What came out of that experience is the poem below—a gathering of voices, a choir of all the women I’ve known, been, read, imagined, inherited. This is the sound of them singing through me.

Internal Concert

{on hearing “labour” by Paris Paloma}

It begins quiet—

a thread of sound winding through the stillness.

I almost don’t notice it at first:

a single note, pressed gently

against the inside of my chest.

I sit still.

But something in me

leans forward.

Her voice arrives like memory—

familiar in ways I can’t explain.

Not mine alone,

but echoing with others.

I descend into imagination,

though it feels like inheritance.

Women I have known,

women I have been—

lined up like shadows at my back.

I carry their weight

in the hollows of my throat.

I have been passed down,

not broken,

but gathered.

It doesn’t play.

It summons.

A voice like smoke rising

from a bonfire of diaries.

As the verse deepens,

I feel that pull at the base of my spine—

as if a thousand women

are reaching for me,

through time,

through blood.

My mother,

her mother,

a friend with too much silence in her laugh,

a girl I once was—

all knees and apology,

the teacher who told me to speak up

but never made space for the answer,

the woman in the mirror at 3 a.m.,

eyeliner smudged, whispering “never again,”

the ones who left too soon,

the ones who stayed too long,

the ones who swallowed whole oceans

just to keep dinner quiet—

And then—

Draupadi, with her disrobed dignity.

Sita, walking through fire because silence was expected.

Radha, who loved and left anyway.

Yashodhara, the wife the Buddha left behind.

Tara, who vowed to never be born a man until suffering ends.

Pandora, blamed for the box, never praised for the hope left inside.

Eve, blamed for curiosity.

Lilith, the first woman who said no and left.

Kali, not evil—just unbothered about being liked.

Durga, with ten arms of fury.

Medusa, punished for surviving, not for sinning.

Phoolan Devi, bandit queen turned parliamentarian.

Savitribai Phule, who taught girls to read in secret.

Amrita Sher-Gil, who painted brown women in a white world.

Kamala Das, who wrote desire into the shape of a woman.

Ismat Chughtai, tried for obscenity, never for irrelevance.

Maya Angelou, whose caged bird still sings.

Malala, bullet in the head, book in the hand.

Simone de Beauvoir, mother of “women aren’t born, they’re made.”

The girl who was told to be careful but not to be free.

The aunt who never married and still sends blessings.

The maid who carries ten kilos of silence on her back.

The neighbor who cut her hair the day after he left.

The stranger crying in the auto, pretending she’s just tired.

The girl reading Rupi Kaur under her school desk.

The bride who didn’t smile in her wedding photo.

The widow who wears red when no one’s looking.

The woman at the police station who wasn’t believed.

The one who walked out in the middle of dinner.

The child who said “No” and was told “That’s not polite.”

Each of them—
bone and blaze, bangles and bruises,

myth and marrow, ancestor and ache,

truth and talisman, wound and weapon.

They are all here.

Watching.
Rooting.
Rising.

I’ve been passed down

like a hymn.

And now I’m the voice

singing this

in front of every man

who tried to hush the storm

by pretending it was drizzle.

It starts soft—

like a match strike in a dark hallway.

Her voice, quiet fury

dressed in silk and stormclouds.

She doesn’t ask me to listen.

She dares me not to.

Suddenly,

I’m not in this room anymore.

I’m in every memory

where I folded myself smaller

to make someone else

feel bigger.

The drums?

That’s the sound of my old anger

getting dressed for a reckoning.

The harmonies?

They’re every version of me

finally singing in sync.

We are no longer whisper.

We are all singing now.

In one voice.

In every voice.

Not for them—

but in front of them.

The song isn’t about heartbreak.

It’s about aftermath.

About gathering what’s left

and making it loud.

And though I’ve never stood

under a stage light,

here I am—

center stage,

mouth open,

throat full of centuries,

singing like I’ve been waiting

my whole life

to be heard,

as if I was born
with the breath
of a thousand silenced women.

I don’t clap.

I just sit there,

shaken

and stitched back together

by the echo of a woman

I’ve never met,

who somehow knows exactly

what broke. 

- Oizys.

{Paris Paloma - labour}

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 24th): Rehearsing silence in a house full of noise

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Four):Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twenty-Four of our annual poetry-writing challenge!

Our featured participant for the day is haphazard, whose birdsong poem for Day Twenty-Three places primacy on the “gaps in the music.”

Today’s daily resource is the Art Institute of Chicago, where just searching the collection for the word “stars,” I found this amazing quilt, a very fancy-looking Soviet plate, and an illustration of the constellation Leo from a medieval Arabic astronomical guide.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. One fundamental aspect of music is its communal nature. While music can be made by a single person, of course, it’s often made in groups. Rock bands, orchestras, church choirs – they all involve making music together. And often, we’re playing or performing music that was written by, or inspired by, other people.

In her poem, Duet, Lisa Russ Spaar tells the story of two sisters making music together, based on two pre-existing songs by different artists. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that involves people making music together, and that references – with a lyric or line – a song or poem that is important to you.

Happy writing!

Note: I love the “Family Portrait” by P!nk and I continued the narrative I began in a recent poem on generational grief. So, here it is, this is my concerto for the unspoken, in five movements.

Rehearsing silence in a house full of noise
(Concerto for a Broken Spine and a Dinner Table)
Inspired by “Family Portrait” – P!nk
(And my yesterday's post.)

I. The Tuning Fork Years

The house begins in B minor,
where the floorboards whine like throats clearing for apologies
no one will offer.
Our voices—spoons clinking, doors sighing,
each one a note from a sheet no one agreed to read.

This was our tremolo:
a flutter of nerves beneath every conversation,
a vibration too subtle to name but impossible to unhear.

No one conducted this movement.
We simply tuned ourselves to the key of survival
and played on.

II. The Chorus We Never Wrote

Ma hums under her breath—
not a song,
but the incantation of women who’ve forgotten
what softness sounds like.

You call it cooking.
I call it self-preservation in cumin and turmeric.
The gas stove, a quiet metronome counting down her last nerve.

Her bangles ticked like metronomes,
each clink a countdown to eruption, or worse—
to nothing at all.

She conducts from the kitchen now,
baton replaced by a spatula,
applause replaced by silence that won’t clap back.

III. Dad, Allegro Appassionato

He plays silence like a cello.
Heavy, weeping, respectable.
The kind of man who mistakes absence for dignity.

His slippers drag across the tiles,
a rhythm we all grew up dancing to.

He is dissonance in a father’s costume—
the space between two notes too close to comfort,
yet too far to reconcile.

We thought he was the audience.
Turns out, he was the ghost of the conductor—
left halfway through the performance,
but still whispering through the wings.

IV. Sibling, Countermelody

We were meant to harmonize,
but our notes clash—
you, sharp as broken glass;
me, flat as the dreams I stitched into pillow seams.

Still, we rehearse.
Still, we sing.

Our fights—crescendos with no resolution,
rising until something snapped,
then falling into a cold rest,
as a moment of false peace
where no apology lives.

You wanted to solo.
I wanted us to blend.
Neither of us learned to listen.

V. Coda: The Only Living Voice

Someday, someone will ask me what our family sounded like.
And I’ll say:
Like applause at the wrong moment.
Like a hymn with all the vowels drowned.
Like someone pressing “rewind” on a scream.

And I’ll walk barefoot across the memory footprints—
Ma’s slippers, Dad’s dragged shoes, your stomps,
my quiet tiptoes—
all of us leaving music in dust patterns.

This was our symphony.
Unfinished.
Unforgiving.
Still echoing.

- Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 23rd): Aria at Dawn

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty-Three): Happy Wednesday, everyone, and happy twenty-third day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Today, our featured participant is Elizabeth Boquet, who brings us a poem with a poem in it in response to Day Twenty-Two’s lessons-based prompt.

Our resource for the day is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum’s online image collection is practically endless, and to call it varied would be an understatement. There’s over 2,000 images just of baseball cards! To say nothing of candelabra featuring what appears to be a scandalized swan, a processional sword belonging to the guardsman of a sixteenth-century German duke, and a couch that I would very much like to fall upon in a melodramatic swoon.

And last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Humans might be the only species to compose music, but we’re quite famously not the only ones to make it. Birdsong is all around us – even in cities, there are sparrows chirping, starlings making a racket. And it’s hardly surprising that birdsong has inspired poets. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that focuses on birdsong. Need examples? Try A.E. Stallings’ “Blackbird Etude,” or for an old-school throwback, Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”

Happy writing!

Aria at Dawn

The city’s throat clears—
a soft cough of engines, a clatter of gates—
but before it all, before coffee brews or dogs bark
the birds begin.

A warbler tries jazz
from the streetlamp’s cold halo—
riffs like a saxophone too caffeinated to sleep.
Somewhere, a pigeon gargles Gregorian chants
into the gutter.

The sparrows? Oh, they’re gossiping.
Treetop tabloids.
Who nested where.
Who left which feather behind.
Who dared peck at her reflection again.

Then, with the self-importance of a town crier
who’s late but refuses to admit it,
a chicken bursts in.

BA-GAWK!
Not so much a song
as a declaration of presence,
a feathered manifesto
delivered from the coop steps
like protest from behind a picket fence.

And from the power lines,
a crow cuts through it all.
Not melody,
but judgment.
A single, gravel-rough Caw—
low, deliberate,
like punctuation
at the end of everyone else’s nonsense,
or a vote cast after long silence.

It silences even the breeze.

I sit with my chipped mug,
half-amused, half-awed.
This world sings in strange choruses—
some with harmony, some with heat.

Once, I thought morning belonged
to alarms and asphalt.
Now I know:

The overture is avian—
jazzed, clucked, and cawed
into light’s slow rise—
[not waiting for permission to begin.]

- Oizys.