NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 24] - Night Shift

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 24]

Day Twenty-Four

We’ve made it to the final Friday of National/Global Poetry Writing Month 2026, everyone!

Today’s featured participant is Poem Dive, where you’ll find a rather heavy response to Day 23’s villanelle prompt, but one that showcases a particular quality of the form — in deft hands, the repeated lines can have a sort of dolorous, bell-like quality, as the poem were tolling its refrains.

Our resource today is this curated selection of letters written by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he explains aspects of his thinking about poetry.

Finally, here is our (optional) prompt for the day! In her poem, “The Flying Nightdress,” Mandakranta Sen describes something fantastical and strange that occurs while the rest of the world is asleep. The imagery of the poem is dreamlike, but the situation it describes is otherwise presented quite straightforwardly. Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that takes place at night, and describes something magical or strange that happens but that no one is awake (or around) to notice.

Happy writing!

-

Night Shift

At night, when no one was awake to accuse the world of anything.

A spoon bends toward the moon. 
A towel remembers the body. 
A closed laptop keeps typing my unsent thoughts.

The office chairs rearrange themselves according to who suffered most that day.
My unread emails grow teeth. 
The cursor blinks like a small, unpaid ghost.

Somewhere, a map quietly changes its mind.
A yellow line eats its way inland.
A border rinses its hands in the dark.

After midnight, the room began returning everything I had swallowed.

While I sleep, my body holds a meeting without me.
While I sleep, my stomach lights a small fire and reads old insults aloud.

My ribs shift furniture. 
My skin sheds one invisible version of me.

On the balcony, the plants whisper in my mother tongue. 
A cup of water grows a tiny moon.

My blanket rises like a hill and shelters all the tired women you have been.

No one sees any of this.

By morning, even the magic has folded itself away.

My mother slowly wakes up and turns the night into yet another morning of labour.

~ Oizys.

-

Note: As Israel occupies Lebanon with its “yellow line,” I wanted the poem to carry, without naming too much, the way a border is used to carve a wound in the dark. Slow Factory Super Fund for Lebanon: An urgent fundraiser supporting families in Lebanon affected by ongoing bombardment and displacement, with donations distributed directly for immediate shelter and food needs. Good night.

something good happened. [haha]

april 19th. 23:37PM.

i am sitting at my table. my mother on the bed. the rain teased us an hour ago and never came, but the windows are open and the wind is generously violent. my mother says she is going to sleep after she closes her phone, which finally brings the devotional music to an end. the room is still the room. the bed is still the bed. the same objects continue their long conspiracy of being familiar. life has been the same for long, long, long.

i want to write so much, but the burden of living so much and yet not being able to live in the way i fantasise, imagine, or sometimes think i deserve, crushes me in these stupid, unheroic intervals. not even all at once. not in operatic crescendos. just steadily. like bad weather that never fully arrives and never fully leaves. i get angry. i get mad in this stale, repetitive way that feels less like fire and more like being slowly pickled in disappointment.

today i got featured on napowrimo for yesterday’s poem. the surprise startled me. it did make me blink and sit up and feel, for a second, as though the membrane between my private effort and the visible world had thinned. but i have not been able to feel happy the way i think i should feel happy. it is humiliating, this inability to perform joy on cue. as if even happiness requires a version of me that is more functional than the one currently available. i do not trust my own responses anymore. i do not know if i am underreacting or if i have already exhausted the feeling elsewhere, in some private rehearsal i cannot access now. that is what irritates me. i had imagined this before. i had rehearsed it in advance the way i rehearse everything: the future compliment, the future recognition, the future version of me receiving it well, graciously, radiantly, with the exact right degree of delight and disbelief. i have fantasised about the event of being seen often enough that when it happened, reality could only arrive already pre-chewed.

and perhaps that is one of the uglier side effects of living so much in anticipation, fantasy, daydream, simulation, imaginary elsewhere: the real thing turns up and finds you strangely unavailable to it. not because you do not care. not because you are ungrateful. but because some part of you already spent the feeling in private. 

and where is god in all this. i kept myself godless for years, almost stubbornly, because i could never locate anything in me that felt worthy of being seen by something higher. or perhaps i could not bear the idea of being seen fully. people say god is comfort, structure, witness. i have always felt like an unsupervised consciousness. i feel plath and dickinson combined here.

plath said, 'I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.' and dickinson said, “I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die”. i understand that too well. i have addressed silence often enough to recognise its texture. and yet i am not even faithful to my unbelief. there are moments i want what others seem to have, that collective surrender, that strange, shared certainty in their psychosis, that soft delusion that something is holding them together.

as a child i already felt outside it. as if everyone else had agreed to drink from something; faith, god, meaning, that opium marx talked about and everyone misunderstood, whatever form it took; and i stood there, suspicious, refusing, and therefore permanently excluded. spiritually orphaned is the closest i can get to naming it.

perhaps that orphanhood has never been only spiritual. perhaps it leaked outward into everything else: friendship, love, belonging, the confidence with which other people seem to enter a room, a city, a decade, and assume there will be something there to meet them.

which sounds spoiled. maybe it is spoiled. or maybe it is just what happens when the mind has been overperforming reality for years. a life too often rehearsed becomes difficult to inhabit live. still, i am glad. i think i am glad. i know i am glad. but the gladness arrived in a muted, underwater way. as if it had to swim to me through too much silt. as if the day itself had too many other rooms inside it for joy to occupy the whole house.

ugh. spontaneously i decided to write this although i have been fermenting things to write for days, and have not been able to press the wine, separate the liquid from the skins and seeds and bitter residue. so if this ends up a large load of dumpy gibberish, then so be it. frankly, i have written worse, and with more confidence in this unknown corner of the web's nowhere.

i have been thinking, as usual, obviously, embarrassingly, a lot. in the background: my life, my family, what i eat, what i do, my house, my job, money, class, marriage, womanhood, politics, religion, god, my country, its vulgar brutalities, iran, lebanon, gaza, palestine, people carrying on under bombardment and occupation and grief so enormous that language should be ashamed to approach it, and the victims here too, the daily humiliations and violences and stupid little acceptances by which a country teaches you what kind of suffering counts and what kind does not. and in the foreground, the constant maladaptive daydreaming, the depersonalization, the derealization, the irritating sensation of being both trapped in this life and not entirely present for it.

sometimes i think my consciousness is split into at least three badly managed departments. sometimes it does not even feel like departments. it feels like pieces. like badly handled flesh. as if i have been split into workable sections and none of them remember belonging to the same body. thought in one place, desire in another, action somewhere else entirely, and the self, if there is one, lagging behind like a witness to its own disassembly. one is trying to survive the day in practical terms: eat, work, bathe, answer, reply, produce, appear normal enough. one is continuously writing alternate lives in the background, furnishing them in absurd detail, giving them cities, clothes, books, apartments, lovers, train stations, versions of my face that look more like mine than mine does. and one is simply standing at a distance from both, watching, dissociating, making notes, becoming alien to the whole production.

this is too much consciousness for one mediocre life. that is perhaps an ungracious thing to say, but there it is.

and the house does not help. how could it. every house develops its own emotional climate and ours has been set, for years, to interruption. even when nothing actively dramatic is happening, there is a density to shared life that exhausts me. the bed where my mother lies. the phone music. the walls that have heard too much. the familiar sounds that should by now have become neutral and instead remain overfull with association. sometimes i feel i have never once had an acoustically innocent life. every room comes pre-interpreted.

and i know, i know, many people have less. this is part of what makes complaint so sticky. gratitude and suffocation can coexist so easily they become almost impossible to untangle without sounding either cruel or pathetic. yes, i have shelter. yes, i have food. yes, i have a meagre job in the social sector where i can pretend to help people. yes, today i was featured for a poem i wrote. yes, people were kind. yes, these are not nothing. and yet the architecture of my dissatisfaction remains standing. what is this life, really. what is this thing i am required to inhabit with such obedience. this banal, thin, almost polite arrangement of existence that still manages to feel grotesque from the inside. a life that looks intact from a distance but, up close, is mostly improvisation, fatigue, and the constant ricochet between imagination and a reality that refuses to deepen. i sometimes feel less like a person and more like a mass being carried forward by habit. not even tragic. just sustained. which might be worse. the walls do not collapse just because one window briefly opened.

maybe that is what disorients me most. that something objectively lovely can happen and still not reorganise the underlying misery. recognition is not relocation. praise is not freedom. being read is not the same as being released. a feature on a poetry site does not magically alter the room, the finances, the fatigue, the family structure, the body, the old griefs, the stalled appetites, the private humiliations, the long habit of feeling life happen in the wrong key. nor does it return the time already spent in becoming someone who can endure disappointment elegantly. which is not the same thing as living well, though women are often trained to confuse the two.

still, i do not want to be unfair to joy either. perhaps joy is smaller than i keep demanding it to be. perhaps it is not a flood but a pocket. perhaps it is just the startled little lift i felt when i saw my name there. perhaps it is the fact that i am writing this at all. perhaps it is the mild stupidity of grinning alone for five seconds before the rest of my brain rushed in with its clipboards and critiques.

my mind is such an overstaffed bureaucracy. no feeling gets through without ten departments stamping it.

i think, too, that part of my trouble is that i am always waiting for outer validation to produce an inner transformation it has never once promised. as if being noticed should settle something fundamental. as if praise should put bones where there has been only fog. as if one small external confirmation should finally silence the older internal voices that have spent years saying: not enough, not yet, not really, not you. but of course it does not work like that. old damage is not impressed by public recognition. it has seen too much continuity to be moved by interruption. it does not believe in moments. it believes in patterns. and my patterns have been stubborn, repetitive, embarrassingly durable. it barely looks up from its desk.

and then there is the stranger, more embarrassing layer: what if i have become so attached to longing, frustration, elsewhere, unreality, and disappointment that even good things arrive as interruptions to a familiar self-concept? what if some part of me does not know how to metabolise happiness unless it also gets to remain tragic? horrible thought. plausible thought. there is something indecent about how well i understand my own traps and how little that understanding changes anything. insight without alteration is its own kind of failure. i catalogue myself endlessly and remain the same.

and perhaps beneath all this there is also the quieter, more ordinary grief: that i have long since forgone the ideas of success i once had for myself, or at least loosened my grip on them so much that they now drift around me like old paper in dirty water. not even dramatic ambitions, necessarily. just the basic, vulgar little visions of a life that would feel recognisably mine. some steadiness. some beauty. some movement. some evidence that i had not merely been stored somewhere for safekeeping while the years got on with their work.

the ages of my twenties keep slipping and slipping, each one leaving behind its thin residue of regret, remorse, sorrow, embarrassment, loss. and what have i done with them. really. what have i done. where are my solo trips now. where are my friends. where are the photographs of youth that look like proof instead of invention. where is love, too, or whatever modest adult version of it i might have managed by now; not the operatic kind, not the kind that ruins empires, just the ordinary fact of being chosen regularly, being known in practice, being folded into someone else’s day without ceremony. where is the evidence that i have been accompanied. or perhaps the evidence exists and i am the one who exiled myself from it. which is somehow worse. not to be left, but to become the mechanism of one’s own leaving. where are the train stations, the hotel mirrors, the clothes thrown over chairs in some temporary room in another country, the badly framed self-portraits, the cheap coffee, the expensive mistakes, the accidental intimacies, the evidence that i once moved through the world as if it might answer me back.

where is the recklessness i thought would redeem me. where is the freedom i kept assuming would begin just after this one obstacle, then the next, then the next. where are the evenings that were supposed to accumulate into memory instead of disappearing into fatigue. where is the life that was meant to acquire texture. 

now i have no friends, or none that belong to the ordinary daily grammar of living. no place to go. no one to hit up on a whim. no person-shaped escape hatch in the evening. no casual proximity, no easy witness, no warm third place where my body might arrive before my thoughts do. whole weeks pass in which i speak, reply, perform, function, and yet remain fundamentally unaccompanied. there are lonelinesses inflicted by the world, and then there are the ones one manufactures with one’s own frightened hands. mine has too often been the second kind.

and this is not even a clean tragedy in which i was merely abandoned by circumstance. i participated in it. perhaps i enforced it.

i think often of the days when i did have friends, or at least the ordinary shape of friendship was still available to me. the last day i met them was the day before napowrimo 2023 began. we went to the bazaar. we shopped for the next day’s farewell. we ate, laughed, twirled, took pictures, played with dogs, drank cool drinks against the heat, gossiped, worried aloud about the future in that half-serious way young people do when they still imagine the future will arrive as an event and not just accumulate around them by stealth. then i came back home and something in me closed like a fist. i never picked up their calls again. i never went to the farewell. rather, with my closed fist, i wrote this poem: napowrimo 2023, day 1, latibulating.

please, if there is any god, do not ask me after i die why i became the enforcer of that cruel abandonment. i have no answer except that perhaps it was the only language i knew. retreat before being reached. vanish before being witnessed too closely. make distance first and call it necessity later.

a year later things had changed for them, as things do. different cities. finished courses. jobs. movement. lives beginning in visible ways. and i was still in my room, stuck in that viscous interval where time passes but nothing seems to convert into forward motion. i joined instagram after a long absence and one friend asked to meet. i declined like a thief. even now that comparison feels exact: furtive, ashamed, already acting as if i had stolen something i could not return.

since then two years have passed. so many napowrimos. i do not reach out. once in a while i like their stories; sometimes they like mine. these tiny, polite digital survivals of something i once held in my hands. what did i do. why did i do it. how does a person turn living, laughing companionship into this thin, haunted afterlife of mutual viewing and almost nothing else.

i helped do this. i withdrew. i disappeared. i made myself the instrument of the loss. i am the co-conspirator of this specific, shame-soaked, ordinary, and brutal (in exactly the right way) loneliness.

there is a particular humiliation in having once imagined adulthood as a widening and finding instead that it can narrow so quietly you barely hear the walls move. one day you realise you do not have a circle, or a scene, or even a dependable corner to disappear into. you just have your own mind, overused to the point of damage, and the stale little routes between work, home, obligation, and the internet.

sometimes i think what devastates me is not even the absence of grandeur, but the absence of density. the terrible thinness of it. the way whole years can pass and leave so little behind except a few exhausted routines, some unfinished drafts, screenshots, browser tabs, receipts, messages half-answered, clothes re-worn into anonymity, and a face in the mirror that looks as if it has been waiting for someone else’s life to start.

it is not that nothing has happened. it is that so much of what has happened feels unusable. untransformed. it has not become story, or memory, or wisdom, or even proper damage. it just lies there in me like badly stored material. the unlived and the half-lived rotting side by side.

i had once imagined my twenties as something feverish, excessive, full of departure. not glamorous, necessarily, but alive. intellectually alive, sexually alive, erotically alive, geographically alive, aesthetically alive, morally alive, politically alive, some kind of alive that would leave marks and make stories. instead there has been so much suspension. so much delay. so much ricochet between endurance and fantasy. so much waiting in one room while the mind drags the body across continents it cannot afford.

and this too is difficult to confess without sounding ridiculous, because many lives are narrower than mine, harsher than mine, poorer than mine, more violently constrained than mine. i know that. i know it with shame. but comparison does not erase the private knowledge of waste. it does not soothe the vulgar panic of realising that youth is not an abstract resource. it is being spent whether i am using it well or not. it is horrifying how possible it is to waste a life without ever doing anything visibly dramatic enough to call waste.

sometimes i want to gather up all the vanished versions of myself... the one who would travel more, love more, read more, risk more, earn more, become more, leave more, refuse more; and line them against the wall like unclaimed luggage. look at them properly. apologise, perhaps. or accuse them. or accuse myself. i do not know which would be more accurate. maybe execute them forever.

what a thin thing a life can become while still remaining unbearably heavy.

and then there is politics, which would be easier to survive if it remained outside the house. but it does not. there is the politics of the world, of the country, of the city, of the street, and then the quieter politics of the home: what is repeated, what is excused, what begins to sound normal, what kind of hardness enters the language and stays. i can feel the moral weather changing around me. i move in one direction by instinct, by study, by injury, by refusal, and they move in another by fear, fatigue, resentment, habit, ambition, television, history. no one announces the split. it just keeps widening in the room.

it is strange to watch the people you belong to become less and less inhabitable to your mind. strange to hear familiar voices begin to carry values that make your skin recoil in private while your face stays neutral. strange to understand that love does not prevent estrangement; it only makes it slower, and more humiliating. even at home there is this creeping sense that the map is being redrawn while i am still inside it.

and what unsettles me most is not merely that they are changing, or revealing themselves more fully, or settling more comfortably into positions i cannot inhabit. it is that i am not outside this. i am not some clean witness standing at a moral distance, taking notes. i am made in part by the same house, the same air, the same repetitions, the same evasions, the same selective tendernesses and sanctioned cruelties. whatever i reject in them, i have had to locate first in myself: in reflexes, in fears, in silences, in the speed with which i excuse what should not be excused, in the cowardices that wear the mask of practicality. i come from them. i live among them. i am materially entangled with them. their language has passed through me. their permissions made me possible. their limitations deformed me. i am trying to refuse what formed me while still eating in the same house.

that is what makes it so exhausting. proximity is not innocence. dependence is not innocence. love is not innocence. i can feel my own complicities peeling away slowly, and not cleanly, and certainly not nobly. there is no dramatic purification in it. only the long, embarrassing work of noticing where i still benefit, where i still keep quiet, where i still choose peace in the room over truth, where i still let comfort be purchased by someone else’s greater vulnerability.

sometimes i think the family is the first state one belongs to, the smallest nation with its own border controls, censored histories, authorised griefs, acceptable enemies, myths of itself, and penalties for dissent. and like any state, it asks for loyalty long after loyalty has become morally expensive. it asks to be understood gently, in context, with compassion for its wounds, while it goes on reproducing wounds of its own. to step even slightly out of line feels at once necessary and treacherous.

i do not know what to do with the guilt of this. guilt that i have not done enough. guilt that i cannot seem to do enough. guilt that my refusals are so often interior, private, unspectacular. guilt that i am still here. guilt that i still need what i critique. guilt that i am trying to unlearn entire moral arrangements while remaining materially sheltered by them. there is something unbearable about needing refuge in the same structure whose values you are trying to survive.

and beyond the house, the scale of the world makes a mockery of individual conscience. what am i supposed to do with all this helplessness. what does one person do with a mind full of cities burning, people starved, children bombed, neighbours brutalised, hatreds normalised, and one’s own body still trapped in the petty logistics of earning, eating, commuting, replying, enduring. there are days when politics feels less like conviction and more like a permanent injury to perception. once you have seen certain things clearly, how do you return to the small, obedient choreography of ordinary life without feeling obscene.

and yet i do return to it. i brush my teeth. i answer emails. i eat dinner. i sit in rooms where opinions pass like contaminated air and say less than i mean because i am tired, because i am outnumbered, because i am dependent, because i do not know how to turn private correctness into public force. this, too, becomes part of the guilt: not only that the world is wrong, but that i remain so administratively continuous within it.

perhaps one of the hardest humiliations of adulthood is learning that moral seriousness does not automatically produce effective power. you can see clearly, feel deeply, refuse inwardly, and still remain terribly limited in what you can alter by nightfall. i cannot save the world from this room. i cannot save anyone at scale. the radius of my action remains humiliatingly small.

so the task, if there is one, may be smaller and less flattering than i once imagined: to reduce the amount of falsehood, consent, and deadness passing through my own life. to speak more accurately. to refuse certain languages. not to laugh at what should not be normalised. to help specific people in specific ways when i can. to send money when i can. to read seriously. to write seriously. to keep some moral clarity intact when the room would prefer mush. not to surrender my mind entirely just because fatigue makes surrender feel reasonable.

it sounds paltry. perhaps it is paltry. but limitation is not innocence, and helplessness is not permission.

what if i cannot leave the house. what if i cannot save anyone. what if the radius of my action remains humiliatingly small. i do not know how to live with that without either becoming self-forgiving too soon or self-punishing to the point of uselessness. perhaps this is another thing no one prepares you for: that moral life, for many of us, is not heroism but attrition. not grand action but repeated refusals, small accuracies, withheld consent, redistributed money, defended language, maintained clarity, the keeping intact of some inward line even when the outer life remains compromised.

which sounds paltry against the scale of suffering. maybe it is paltry. but perhaps the task was never to save the world from one room. perhaps it is only to reduce the amount of falsehood, consent, and deadness passing through one’s own life. to keep some inward line intact. to refuse certain languages. to resist the convenience of numbness. to help where one can without turning that smallness into an alibi. 

but i do not know what else to do except refuse the seductions available to me: numbness, cynicism, self-exoneration, the convenience of saying i am powerless and therefore unaccountable. powerlessness is real. so is the moral laziness that sometimes disguises itself as despair. i am trying to tell the difference.

still, i hate how little it feels like. i hate how the conscience can be so alive while the body remains so constrained. i hate how clearly one can think and how inadequately one can act. i hate that history keeps arriving in the room and finding me underqualified for it.

i do not mean that i want misery. i mean that the psyche grows strange little loyalties. it becomes used to its own weather. one can become so accustomed to being the woman who is almost, nearly, on the verge, not yet, later, someday, elsewhere, that any actual arrival feels suspiciously out of character.

and yet i am tired of being elsewhere in advance. tired of pre-living, pre-grieving, pre-mourning, pre-irritated, pre-annoyed, pre-sad, pre-interpreting, pre-exhausting experience before it has the decency to happen. tired of having so much life take place in fantasy that reality feels like an administrative follow-up. tired of being split between the person at the table, the person in the imagined future, and the person hovering above both with a notebook and a headache.

outside, the rain still has not come. only the wind. all gesture, no event. perhaps that is why it feels fitting tonight.

my mother will sleep soon. the room will darken into its usual arrangement. tomorrow, monday, will arrive with its familiar demands, vulgar and undignified as ever. i will still have to wake up inside the same life. but tonight i wanted to place on record at least this much: that something good happened, and i am trying, in my clumsy, delayed, overthought way, to let it belong to me. even if only partially. even if my mind keeps trying to convert it into theory, guilt, irony, suspicion, or prose.

if i am honest, i am not even waiting for a different life anymore. i am waiting for a different way of being inside this one. because the years are not pausing while i think. they are going. they are going with or without my permission, and i am increasingly frightened by how little of them feels inhabited from the inside. which feels both more possible and more impossible at the same time.

something good happened. i was here for some of it. let that count.

april 20. 01:07AM.

anyway, my mother had fallen asleep. the wind stopped, the heat returned, and that was enough to wake her. she asked me if i planned to sleep now and switch off the lights or if i had to “work more.” the concern, as always, is the light. not my sleep. as long as i switch it off and lie down under the covers, silent and still, she can sleep.

it is strange how easily a life can be reduced to such negotiations. not even conflict. just adjustment. dim the light. lower the sound. occupy less space. become less noticeable. continue.

so i will close this, switch off the light, and lie down like a reasonable person inside a life that continues tomorrow whether i feel ready for it or not.

i had planned, earlier in the day, to write a blog on my other, more politically articulate alter-alter ego account about the recent happenings, something sharp, something properly argued, something that would at least pretend to meet the scale of what is unfolding outside. i had also planned to wash my hair, take a proper bath, reset the body in some minimal, dignified way, which, if i am being honest, i have not done in two days now. i think two. maybe more. time has a way of blurring when the days repeat themselves this closely.

instead i am here, still sitting at the table, thinking in long, unusable sentences.

perhaps i will simply go into my covers and rot quietly with my unwashed hair and unwritten thoughts. that seems, in a strange way, the most socially efficient option. it will invite no comments, require no explanations, cause no disturbance. i can fit myself back into the expected shape of the night without insisting on being noticed, without the small chaos of sitting here, writing, keeping the light on, existing too visibly.

or perhaps i will get up, walk to the bathroom, stand under water, do the small necessary labour of tending to a body that i keep postponing. both options feel disproportionately heavy. the journey from this table to my bed is, tonight, longer than it should be. not physically. just in the way a mind can stretch a few steps into something like resistance.

let’s see which version of me gets up.

~ Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12] - the oldest woman i remember

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12]

Day Twelve

Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twelve of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Today, our featured participant is Kavya Janani U, who brings us a forbiddingly calm response to Day Eleven’s erasure/blackout prompt. It’s very interesting to contrast here the blacked-out text with the original text.

Our daily resource is this essay by the poet Yuki Tanaka on (mis)translation and how unusual or surprising word choices can make a poem come alive.

Finally, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Happy writing!

-

the oldest woman i remember

i remember her almost by furniture.

my grandmother’s grandmother,
my motherline made visible
for one brief afternoon,
sat on a chair
in the village house 
as if she had always been there

while my parents moved through the day
with their younger noise
and my grandmother,
not yet memory herself,
stood nearby,
already practiced
in the old labour of attending.

i was too small
to understand any of it,
to know what it meant
that my grandmother came from her
and i came from my grandmother.

i was too small
to understand lineage,
to understand what it meant
to come from women
who came from women
who came from women.

i was too small
to know what it meant
to belong to so many women at once.

i was too small to know
that a girl first learns womanness
by watching
how women are in a room,
how they sit,
how they wait,
how they are spoken to.

i only knew
that everyone seemed to know
how to place themselves around her.

i do not remember her voice.
i do not remember
the colour of her garment,
the month, the weather,
what anyone said to her.

only this:
she sat there
with such finished stillness
that the whole room
seemed to take its shape from her.

the chair was ordinary.
that is what stays with me.

not carved, not holy,
not ceremonial, not special,
not even remarkable enough
for a child to love at once.
just a chair,
and in it
a woman who had lived long enough
to stop explaining her right
to take up space,
to make quiet look ancestral.

she sat the way
very old trees stand:

very still.
not stiff.
not resting either.
just there.

i think now
that this is part of how womanness arrived to me:

not through mirrors,
not through bangles,
not through the first blood,
not through the first warning,
but through old women,
in the sight of old women
whose bodies had become
archives of use,
what life had asked of them
and what life had done to them,

who sat as if tiredness
proved they had carried something,

who sat with the tiredness
of women who had done everything asked of them
and more,

who took up space
without making anyone comfortable,
without needing to brighten it,
without smiling for it,
without softening age
into something pretty.

she is dead.
my grandmother is dead.
and still the line continues,
not neatly, 
definitely not kindly,
but definitely in gestures.

and now, years later,
she returns to me
whenever i see an old woman
lower herself carefully into a chair,
whenever an older woman
takes the edge of a room
and somehow still changes the whole room,
whenever i find myself sitting quietly
at family gatherings,
watching more than speaking,
as if the mothers before me
left instructions in the spine,
as if i had been taught this
without anyone teaching me.

in the way i enter a house
already measuring its silences.
in the way i watch women’s hands
before i trust their words.
in the way i have learned
that to endure is also
a language passed down.

perhaps that was what she did
that has not stopped echoing:

she sat there
so fully in her place
that a little girl, passing through,
could carry the shape of it away
without knowing,
without understanding,
what it meant
to belong to women:

to their hush,
their labour,
their vanishing,
their unspectacular thrones

and carried that shape away
in her body.

~ Oizys.

camphor and control

i’ve been struggling to write about my father for as long as i can remember, like any other woman, any other daughter. then i saw a reel video by sarga_mmm [just some time ago while doomscrolling under my soft covers while spying on my mother snore hoping she doesn't wake up]. she captures the essence beautifully (soft, naïve even; i would’ve said it betok-elaan), but still, it caught the whole alphabet of my inner child’s begging, a to z. maybe that’s why it hit me the way it did, not as a poem or performance, but like a mirror shoved in front of me mid-breath. 

how strange that simple, uneven words can unearth what’s buried. i’ve written about love, and loss, and freedom, but never about him, not really. i always stopped just short of the truth, as if my pen got scared. maybe writing about him is like unlocking a room sealed years ago: air heavy, familiar, still smelling of camphor and control. 

that video made me notice how many versions of me lived inside his silence: the girl who waited for footsteps to fade before exhaling, the teenager rehearsing bravery in whispers, the woman who pretends she doesn’t flinch when someone raises a voice. ridiculous, patterned, real. i wonder if he knew... the tiny rebellions, the swallowed sentences, the high marks that weren’t pride so much as safety. and why, after all these years of living alone, paying my bills, choosing my life, my chest still tightens when someone says “papa.” 

maybe forgiveness isn’t a grand event but a slow undoing, one layer at a time. maybe this is me trying. not hating the fear, just acknowledging it, tracing its edges, learning its name. and somewhere between ache and understanding, i still want to ask him; softly, without trembling; “papa, कैसे हो?” not for an answer, but because saying it out loud feels like reclaiming the part of me that was too afraid to speak.

maybe the fear didn’t start as fear. maybe it became a habit, like folding bedsheets too neatly or rinsing cups twice. the house trained me to hear mood in the clink of keys, the weight of footsteps, the way a door shut half an inch faster. i got fluent in that language. i still am. some evenings, when the light turns the color of old brass, my shoulders climb on their own. the body remembers what the mind negotiates away. 

there were good days too, which is what makes it knottier. a mango sliced just right. a new pencil on the first day of term. a ride on the scooter where the wind slapped my cheeks and i forgot, for ten minutes, to be careful. these little mercies confuse the verdict. they soften the outline of the man and blur the edges of the rules. you’d think that would help. sometimes it does. other times it feels like a trap inside a kindness. 

i keep circling the question of fault like a stray dog around a closed bakery. was he cruel or simply unequipped. did he hold the world like a hammer and see every noise as a nail. nobody trained him in tenderness; men of that era were given belts and budgets and silence. i know this. i also know my knees learned the choreography of apology before my voice learned to say no. both truths sit in the same chair and won’t make room for each other. 

what i want now is smaller than forgiveness and somehow braver. i want the right to enter a room without shrinking. to speak a sentence to completion without scanning faces for weather changes. to laugh at full volume and not feel disloyal to an old version of myself. to put down the tray of chai, अख़बार, sugar in a steel katori and sit. simple verbs. sit. stay. breathe. 

today i tried something ordinary. i made tea and didn’t rush. let the kettle sing. i watched steam curl like handwriting i could almost read. i said “papa” into the empty kitchen and waited for the alarm in my chest. it came; prickly, fast; then loosened. i sipped. too sweet. i sipped again. no disaster. only the dissolving peppermint crystals getting louder. it felt like cheating fate. it felt like nothing. it felt like a door opening a quarter inch.

i’ve been thinking about the girl i was, the one who perfected invisibility. i want to take her to a fair and buy her that stupid neon balloon shaped like a rabbit. i want to let it go on purpose and watch her cry and then laugh at how silly it was to hold so tight. i want to teach her a better trick: hold your own hand first. 

if i ever have a daughter, i won’t be a saint; i’ll lose my temper and burn the dal and forget sports day. but i will not confuse fear with discipline. i will not call obedience love. 

somewhere in the middle of all this inventory receipts of pain, receipts of care, i find a thin place where the world softens. i don’t know what to do with it except keep standing there. i can’t rewrite childhood, but i can edit the margins of today. call it reparenting, call it late learning, call it me growing a spine that bends toward gentleness. i think of the women before me who stitched their mouths shut with duty and still sang lullabies. i think of the men who swallowed apologies until their throats turned to stone. i am tired of inheriting geology. 

so i will practice small sentences that make room in the air. “i’m not comfortable.” “please stop.” “i need time.” “i’ll visit next month.” “no.” i’ll let my no be a full stop, not a comma leading to an explanation. i’ll let my yes be chosen, not extracted. i’ll keep the old photographs because history matters, but i’ll put them in a box that doesn’t open by itself. 

and if a day comes when i can look him in the eye and ask, steady and clear, “papa, कैसे हो?” i hope i also remember to ask myself the same question, first. maybe the answer will be simple on that day. maybe it will be a paragraph. maybe it will be silence that doesn’t scare me. i can live with any of those. 

for now, i’ll end here, not because the story is finished, but because i am. i’ll wash the cup, switch off the light, and let the night be only night. tomorrow i’ll wake up with the same face, newer by a breath. and in that tiny newness, i will try again.

~ Oizys.

Endnotes:

1. “papa, कैसे हो?” — “Papa/Dad, how are you?”

2. “chai, अख़बार, katori” — chai = tea; अख़बार (akhbār) = newspaper; katori = small steel bowl.

Black on her hands // God is not in the chat

Part 1: Black on her hands

So, I got my keyboard repaired this weekend. The weekend itself has been quite glazy; soft-edged, slippery, like I wasn’t fully inside it. The animal has been clawing within me again. Overthinking. Over-psychoanalyzing. Everything. Everyone. Myself most of all. 

Saturday was almost ethereal; a good, smooth day. Had some evening snacks with my sister; they were almost good. I was almost full, so I skipped dinner. Sunday morning, we cooked together. Somewhere between spices and small talk, I got sick. Paused. Came back to the kitchen anyway. We had pasta together; a quiet, warm thing. Later, we played games. She went to sleep. I didn’t. I listened to music, aimlessly daydreamed, drifted a little. Then my parents came back from a trip. My sister and I had a heavy late lunch. I started getting ready to go out with her. That’s when it happened.

I overheard my mother talking on the phone with her friend (the one who invited her to her daughter’s wedding ritual just hours earlier, but never mentioned the dress colour code). That same friend is starting a new business. And just like that, it struck me. A memory, soft and loud at once. One night, many nights ago, I remember my mother speaking in that half-asleep tone, whispering an idea: a small business she wanted to start. Something to sell. Something to create. And now, here we are. Someone else is doing it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It sat like a rock in my chest, a mist in my head.

Was my mother like me? Does she get sadly jealous too? Of others who do the things she once wanted for herself? Not the mean kind of envy, not to drag them down, but that quiet grief of seeing someone do the thing you dreamed of, and realizing: you didn’t. I couldn’t stop. I kept thinking about it while getting ready, while walking out, while handing over my laptop at the repair store, while sitting at the coffee shop to wait. It clung to me. This thought: My mother’s hand: black with her dreams rotting. And I don’t even know what I meant by that. But it felt true. Like somehow, her losses are shadow versions of my fears. And I can’t stop staring at them. Guilt oozes as conflicting emotions tear me apart. It’s not just sadness. It’s not just fear. It’s something messier; grief, envy, love, helplessness; all tangled. Why am I thinking about this so much? Why can’t I shake it off? Is it because she never got to have anything of her own? Is it because, in some terrible, unspoken way, my existence is complicit in robbing her of that chance? Or is it just my own fear: fear that I won’t be successful, that I’ll end up with the same unfinished dreams, locked away behind kitchen shelves and wedding invites? Maybe that’s why it hurts. Maybe when I see that flicker of fate in her, I panic: not for her, but for myself. And then I hate myself for making it about me. Is that hypocritical? Is it just human? I don’t know. But I keep thinking about it. And it won’t let me go. I can’t tell where she ends and I begin. And I don't know how to live a life like this: her burden or my burden or ours together. I guess that’s why I romanticize the idea of death. I guess that’s why I subconsciously stay back in this house to sit beside my mother’s misery like a quiet, unwanted guest. And I don't know how to escape this anymore. I blame the system. The society. The culture. The institution. Her family. My grandparents. My father. Her brother. Her sisters. All of them. Every single one. The ones who told her to be quiet. To adjust. The ones who made her believe a woman’s worth is in the way she serves, not the way she dreams. The ones who laughed when she imagined a life that was hers alone. The ones who called her ambition a phase, a tantrum, a shame. And maybe I blame myself, too, for not doing enough, for not being enough, for watching her shrink and never learning how to expand. Not out of drama. Not to escape. Just… the idea of rest. Silence. A life where I don’t feel like I’m carrying her broken dreams in my bones. A life that is mine, not an apology for hers. A morning where I wake up and the grief isn’t already waiting by the bed. A day without history clawing at my back. Just one breath that is completely my own. And even that feels hypocritical. Because what I genuinely want is a life like that for the two of us. For her, and for me. And I know that’s not possible. So the want and the realization wrestle; quietly, endlessly; inside me.

Part - 2: God is not in the chat

I came across ismatu.gwendolyn’s idea: journaling the news. Oh, the news. I pick it up now like a bruised fruit I can’t eat. It sits in my hand, leaking. And I scroll. Israel bombs Iranian nuclear sites. Children die unnamed in Gaza. Boats sink with people no one will ever rescue or remember. Another leader rises. Another lie is swallowed whole. The planet warms. The people rage. The screens glow. And I just sit here. People are calling me. Messaging me. Emailing me. I have a meeting at 2. But I’m numb. So numb and uncaring when I am also, somehow, desperate for a job. For stability. For hope. Why? I try to figure it out, but I don’t know why. Maybe the horror is too big. Maybe the ambition feels fake next to missiles and mass graves. Maybe I’ve read too much news and not enough poetry. Maybe it’s all real. Maybe none of it is. The disconnect is dizzying. I open LinkedIn in one tab and watch war footage in the other. I update my CV while a death toll ticks up in real time. How am I supposed to care about bullet points when actual bullets are flying? How do I write a cover letter when the world’s on fire and no one’s coming with water? I think maybe this is why we all feel stuck. Not because we’re lazy or lost, but because the scale of suffering has made desire feel embarrassing. How dare I want good pasta or a great job or peace of mind when a mother across the border is digging her child out of rubble? And yet. I still want those things. I still check my email. I still attend the meeting. I still click “Apply.” Because what else is there? I’m not uncaring. I’m just… overwhelmed. And I don’t know if I’m numbed by tragedy or by powerlessness. Or if I’ve fused the two into a single feeling I don’t know how to name. But I’ll keep journaling. Not because it helps... But because it’s the only thing I know how to do. I keep refreshing the news. I scroll like it’s prayer: repetitive, empty, desperate. And in between, I ask the question I’ve been avoiding for months: What kind of future are we building toward? A future where we livestream war crimes and meme them before the blood is dry? Where billionaires play gods and actual gods stay silent? Where no one knows what truth is: only what trends? Are we building anything at all? Or just endlessly rearranging the rubble, calling it progress? I keep thinking: where is "god" in all this? The one they say watches everything. Is he watching now? Is he numb like me? Did he leave the room the moment we created the concept of “collateral damage”? Or maybe he’s still here, just quiet, buried under bureaucracy and drone strikes and funeral hashtags. And what are humans even? We are creatures who can cry over a fictional death in a show, and scroll past real dead children with dry eyes. We are capable of invention, of tenderness, of art and somehow also this: rape as a weapon of war. propaganda as morning news. people dying in the desert while rich men argue about fuel prices. What does that make us? Are we monsters pretending to be angels? Or angels slowly choosing to become monsters because it’s easier? And yet... And yet I see someone pull a cat out of rubble. I see strangers share their food in refugee lines. I see musicians play under the sound of bombs. I see love letters written on broken walls. So maybe we're not one thing. Maybe humans are the only creature both divine and disastrous: godlike in our dreams, but cursed by our choices. We want heaven. We build hell. We pray in the ruins. And me? I just sit here. Still scrolling. Still typing. Still trying to thread together headlines and heartbreak into something that makes sense. Still hoping there’s a shape to this chaos. Still believing, maybe foolishly, that writing it down is a way of staying human.

- Oizys

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 13th): We are the eggshells he loves walking all over

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Thirtheen): Happy Sunday, all – I hope you have an enjoyable thirteenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Chronicles of Miss Miseria, where the response to Day Twelve’s symphonic, Stevens-inspired prompt fires on all cylinders.

Our daily resource is the online collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, founded in 1947 by Brazilian businessman Assis Chateaubriand. Here, you’ll find everything from old masters to mysterious photographs.

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Donald Justice’s poem, “There is a gold light in certain old paintings,” plays with both art and music, and uses an interesting and (as far as I know) self-invented form. His six-line stanzas use lines of twelve syllables, and while they don’t use rhyme, they repeat end words. Specifically, the second and fourth line of each stanza repeat an end-word or syllable; he fifth and sixth lines also repeat their end-word or syllable. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that uses Justice’s invented form.

Happy writing!

-

A note before I start: WOW. I got featured! I had so much fun writing it yesterday, and when I saw today's post, I realized I had been featured. I feel like I’ve achieved Nirvana, haha! This is actually a life-defining moment for me. I never even imagined getting featured, and yet here I am, receiving such beautiful comments from other participants. This keeps me going—not just in writing, but in life as well. Thank you, everyone!

Last night was particularly tough. After wrapping up a very exhausting work week, I sat down to write a diary entry for the blog but couldn't finish it. Then, this morning, a pleasant surprise awaited me, which made things a bit better. So, I decided to take the bits and pieces of the entry I had written last night and turn them into poetry by fitting them into Justice’s self-invented form. Does it have a name? Is it called the Loop? Or the Tandem?

Anyway, I was a bit jittery today, mood-wise, so I used this syllable counter because I kept losing track. It took me the entire day to shape that entry into a poem. Now, as midnight approaches, and with it, the burden of a new work week, I’m just posting whatever I could conjure up.

-

We are the eggshells he loves walking all over

We are the eggshells he loves walking all over,
Not with fear, but thrill, like it's all part of the game.
He steps in silence but leaves thunder in the hall,
He does it softly—still, it’s all part of the game.
We try to warn each other when he’s shifting moods,
Again, we brace, pretend it’s wind that rattles moods.

I learnt to read the air before I learnt to read.
His belt hung quiet, and the silence said obey.
I bit my tongue so hard I almost named it, mine.
The air grew thicker, and the silence said obey.
I watched Mom fold, then fold again, then look away—
When he begins to speak, where I go is away.

Mother folds her rage into napkins, perfectly,
While he notes on dinner like we’re hosting a play.
We learn to smile through clenched forks and paper roses,
We keep the table set, like we’re hosting a play.
We nod, and no one mentions how we never breathe,
You might crack beneath his gaze, if too deep you breathe.

He speaks and we all break in the silence we’ve kept,
Not a voice by us, just a specter of his name.
The house trembles as if it too cannot forget,
Not a word for us, but a shadow of his name.
The weight of this love presses down, and we try to hold,
Except we fold, while waiting for the weight to hold.

- Oizys.

Another note after we are done: From today's resource, I got to know about this artist, Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, and I found this painting of hers called Três mulheres (Three Women) and I was immediately interested by its raw intimacy. there’s something deeply emphatic about the way she portrays the women, almost as if their stories are being told in silence, through texture and color. It felt uncannily aligned with the emotion with which I was writing today. These three women, in the painting, rooted, expressive, enduring. It kept me reminded of the mother and daughters in my poem. There’s pain there, yes, but also a strange kind of dignity, a defiance that doesn’t shout but holds. I’ve been feeling scattered and cracked lately, like I’m trying to carry too much in too many directions. But looking at her painting kept me going while I wrote today's poem, and then rereading what I’d written, I felt seen. Maybe even held.

It’s strange how art finds you exactly when you need it. That's why, I love this year's NaPoWriMo theme. Her painting and Justice’s form, gave me tone and structure: together they formed a sound medium to hold the fragments. Not fixing everything, but making something from the brokenness. Just a poem, or a breath, or a painting of three women, holding their ground.

A dream, a Hindi poem, some roadblocks, negative bank balance & a heart full of melancholic rebellion

April 9th - 10th, 2025.

This afternoon, as the soft rays of sunlight filtered through my makeshift curtains (made from my mother’s old clothes) I couldn’t help but write down the strange and vivid dream I had last night. It felt so real like I had walked through an ancient city full of lively history. I had run away from home, travelling aimlessly. With just one bag and my laptop. The streets were yellow, and the air was thick with the scent of old wood and spices. I wandered through narrow alleys, searching for a shop to buy some food, feeling completely lost. I found a shop and I saw a man buying some sweet food, I asked if he could relay my message to the shopkeeper to give me some vanilla ice cream and the shopkeeper was a bit disappointed. And then, suddenly, I bumped into someone familiar.

It was A—my school friend, the one I hadn’t seen in years. She looked just like I remembered: laughing, carefree, strikingly plum and beautiful, a bright spark of joy amid that ancient, bustling city. I ran to her, telling her how I ended up there with no plan, no itinerary. She offered to help me, consoling me in a way I didn’t expect. It felt so different from how we were when we were kids. Back then, she was always the centre of our friendship, and I was the one who loved being her rock. There was also someone else in the dream, someone who felt like a very close friend but I can’t quite remember who they were. It’s like they slipped through my fingers, like sand running through my hands. Now, just a stick figure in my blurry dream. Still, I can feel the warmth of that dream, like a gentle whisper of night that stays with you even after you wake up.

Before I could process it all, I found myself in the newly renovated, cramped kitchen with my mother, making tea. We started talking about my recent work on child marriage and the challenges that come with it. As I shared my thoughts, she looked at me with that quiet understanding in her eyes, both wisdom and concern. Then she told me a story I hadn’t heard before, one that stuck with me. It was about a girl from a village I know, a teenager who had just been married off by her parents and was already pregnant. My mother described her voice as so young, barely having begun her life, yet already carrying this heavy burden. I could see the worry in my mother’s eyes, the weight of knowing how many young girls are still trapped in these cycles of early marriage.

That conversation stayed with me as I worked today. It gave me a weirdly renewed sense of urgency to keep going. But then, just as I was about to look up some cases for my research work, I found out that my access to the research databases I’ve been relying on was suddenly cut off. The user doesn't exist, it said. No warning, no explanation! It felt like such a big setback, a roadblock in the middle of everything I’ve been building like a bunch of coins wrapped in socks hitting you right across your face. It’s frustrating, and I don’t know exactly what to do next, but I’ll have to figure it out. I’ve sent some emails and am hoping for replies. Still, it’s disheartening. Amidst all of this, working in a social work sector and relying on funders' timeline of giving our organization, I have to decide when to pay my utility bills which is not exactly in my hands though.

So, I sat down to proofread and publish something with this entry I’d been meaning to finish: a poem that had been brewing in my mind for weeks. I finally wrote it all down last night, top to bottom. I’m not sure why, but writing it last night felt like a release, a way to process everything I’ve been feeling lately. Maybe it’s the dream, the conversation with my mother, or the frustration with the database issue. But when I read the words today, they felt like my emotional safety net today:

Main, Beti — Ek Virasat Ki Saza

(Ek Roohani Safar Ek Aurat Ki Awaaz Mein)

(Zakhm ko chamak nahi chahiye, sirf samajh chahiye)

Baap ke tamachon ne,

Rishtedaar ke tamashon ne,

Maa ki tamanna ne,

Meri tanhaayi ko maroda hai.

Raato ki khamoshi ne,

Andar ke toofanon ko chhoda hai,

Har hansne wali tasveer ke peeche

Ek roya hua chehra chhupa hua hai.

Doston ki chhupi hui hansi ne

Mere jazbaat ka mazaak uda diya,

Aur dil ke har tukde ne

Kisi yaad ka kafan odh liya.

Ab to khud se bhi dar lagta hai,

Aaina bhi aankhon mein jhaankta nahi,

Zindagi ne itna giraaya hai

Ke maut bhi mujhse sharmata nahi.

Baap ke gusse ka dar,

Maa ke aansuon ka dukh,

Chaar logon ki baaton ne

Ginwa diye hain aakhri din...

Sapne jo kabhi aankhon mein palte the,

Aaj woh sirf aankhon ke kone mein jalte hain.

Jin rishtey ko rab ka roop kaha tha,

Wahi ab seene mein shool sa chubhte hain.

Har narmi ek toheen ban gayi,

Har khushi ek saza lagti hai.

Zindagi ke is sheher mein,

Tanhai meri sabse wafadar saathi hai.

Na koi poochhne wala,

Na koi sunne wala hai yahan.

Bas ek khud se sawaal hai:

“Main ab bhi zinda hoon... kyun?”

Baap ka bhaari ghamand,

Maa ki halki si hansi,

Behen ki yaad,

Parchhaayi ko satati hai.

Khaali kamre ki deewar par

Uske gel pen se likhe naam ab bhi hain,

Aur uski chhoti-chhoti baatein

Raat ke sannate mein cheekh ban jaati hain.

Ek pal ko lagta hai sab kuch theek ho jaayega,

Magar doosre hi pal,

Zehar sa lagta hai har tasalli ka lafz:

“Sab theek ho jaayega…”

Dil to ab bhi dhadakta hai,

Magar kisi intezaar mein nahi,

Bas aadat hai...

Saans lene ki, jeene ki,

Kuch mehsoos kiye bina.

Intezaar hai us din ka,

Jab jalega baap ka ahankar,

Aur amar hogi maa ki azadi.

Us umeed ne rakha hai mujhe

Is kaali raat mein garam.

Jab behen ke sapno ko pankh milenge,

Aur nafrat ke dariya sookh jaayenge.

Jab sirf naam ka nahi,

Asliyat ka pyaar har chhat ke neeche rahega.

Main nahi chahti badla,

Bas khula aasmaan chahti hoon,

Jahan saans lene par

Kisi ke gusse ka bojh na ho.

Woh subah aayegi,

Jab maa muskaraayegi,

Aur main, ek baar phir,

Khud ko gale laga paungi...

Baap ka chillana,

Maa ka rona,

Waqt ka guzarna,

Rishtedaron ki tipanni,

Behan ke safarnaame,

Dosti ki yaadein,

Pyaar ka: na koi naam-o-nishaan.

Har kona, har chehra,

Ek chhoti si kahani ke tukde hain,

Jise main roz jodti hoon,

Aur raat tak phir se bikhar jaati hoon.

Na kabhi kisi ne poocha

Ke chhup rehna bhi cheekh sakta hai,

Na hi samjha

Ke muskurana, kabhi-kabhi, maut jaisa lagta hai.

Ab to khushi bhi ajeeb lagti hai,

Jaise kisi aur ki zindagi chura rahi hoon,

Aur dard...

Woh to meri apni milkiyat hai,

Jaise virasat mein mila ho koi zakhm ka makaan.

Bachpan ke sapne,

Jawani ki maaya,

Budaape ka dar,

Karm ka na koi phal,

Aur na hi badan ka khayal.

Zindagi ke har mod par

Bas ek sawaal rehta hai:

"Main yeh sab kyun jhel rahi hoon?"

Aur har baar jawab mein

Ek khaali khamoshi milti hai.

Peechhe mudh ke dekho to

Bas adhoore iraade,

Aage dekho to

Bas dhundhla sa andhera.

Jo tha, woh chala gaya,

Jo hai, woh jhooth lagta hai,

Aur jo aayega...

Usse milne ka hausla hi nahi bacha.

Par ab bhi...

Kahin dil ke kisi kone mein

Ek chingari si bachi hai

Shayad kisi savere ki,

Shayad ek khud ke gale lag jaane ki...

Is zindagi ke chakravyuh mein,

Jitni koshish kar loon bhaagne ki,

Wahi khalwat mein,

Usi bistar par,

Ek hi kamre mein band,

Mere sapne sadhte hain,

Aur uski buu se rooh

Roz thoda aur murjha jaati hai.

Deewaron ne sun liya hai

Jo duniya sun nahi paayi,

Aur takiye ne pi liya hai

Woh har aansu

Jo aankhon se bhi chhupa tha.

Hawa tak sawal karti hai ab:

"Ab bhi zinda ho?"

Aur main bas ek muskaan pehne

Keh deti hoon, "haan... kuch had tak."

Na roshni se dosti hai,

Na andheron se dushmani,

Bas aadat si ho gayi hai

Har raat ke khaali paanon mein

Apne hone ko talashne ki.

Chahe jitni bhi koshish kar lu main lekin,

Baap ka gussa: apne khoon se,

Maa ka doodh: apni niyat se,

Kabhi alag nahi hota.

Chahe jitni takkar laga lu main lekin,

Baap ka magn,

Maa ki chuppi,

Ke mishrit pehchaan ke daldal mein

Joojhne ka taqkar koi nahi hara sakta.

Main nafaqat insaan hoon,

Main ek silsila hoon,

Us virasat ka, jo kabhi chaha hi nahi gaya.

Har baras,

Mujhe jise dho kar naya banna tha,

Wahi baras mujhe aur gehra doobta gaya.

Aaj bhi apne aap se ladti hoon,

Kya sach mein main “main” hoon?

Ya sirf unke jhoothe khwab

Aur adhoore iraadon ka

Ek zinda saboot?

Kyonki na baap ki dambhi,

Na maa ke insaaf,

Beti ko kabhi bacha paaya hai

Is samaj ke chaar logon ki katcheri se.

Jahan na aawaaz ka mol hai,

Na khamoshi ki izzat,

Jahan beti ka sapna

Sirf parchaiyon mein likha jaata hai,

Aur uske iraade

Sharm ke naam pe jala diye jaate hain.

Usne khud se poocha hai aksar:

“Kya galti thi meri?

Kya paida hone ka faisla mera tha?”

Magar jawab har baar

Ek aur dard ban kar laut aata hai.

Kapdon ki lambai,

Chaal ki sidhaai,

Zubaan ki theek line,

Yeh sab likh diye gaye hain

Uske hone ke niyam ke taur pe,

Jabki uski har saans

Kisi azaadi ke geet ki talaash mein hai.

Woh roti hai toh kehte hain:

“Naazuk hai”,

Woh ladti hai toh bolte hain:

“Badtameez hai”,

Aur agar chup reh jaaye

Toh samaj ke kaanon mein

Zyada sukoon bajta hai.

Beti hone ka bojh

Kandhon pe nahi,

Rooh mein utar jaata hai.

Aur har baar jab koi

Uske hone pe sawal uthata hai,

Woh sirf zinda nahi rehti,

Woh pal-pal mar jaati hai.

Aur jab yehi beti ban jaati hai

Ek aurat,

Wahi baap ban jaata hai

Ek mard,

Aur maa kho jaati hai

Julmi samaj ke itihaas mein.

Beti ki galti

Uske sanmaan ke saath baandh di jaati hai,

Woh sanmaan

Jo uss mard ka katputli hota hai,

Wahi mard

Jo kabhi beti ko gale lagane par

Hichkichata nahi tha,

Magar duniya ke dar se

Uski zindagi ko hi jhukane laga.

Aur jab beti apni zubaan kholti hai,

Toh use "tez" kaha jaata hai,

Jab woh khud ke liye khadi hoti hai,

Toh use "besharam" samjha jaata hai.

Uski har saans

Ek faisla ban jaati hai

Jis par poori duniya

Judge ki kursi par baith jaati hai.

Aur tab samajhta hai koi bhi nahi,

Ke jis aurat ko woh chhoti soch mein tol rahe hain,

Woh pehle ek beti thi

Jo sirf pyaar chaahti thi,

Na ki sirf bardasht karne ki taleem.

Aur tab,

Us aurat ka sab kuch,

Uski bolti zubaan,

Uski chalti soch,

Uski jeeti-jagti rooh

Ek saza ban jaati hai.

{Yeh meri kahani nahi,

Yeh har us beti ki kahani hai

Jisne apni pehchaan virasat mein pai thi,

Aur apna wajood...

Khud banana pada.

Main, beti banke paida hui thi,

Aurat bankar likhi gayi hoon.

Magar kahaani ab bhi adhoori hai...

Kyunki kal ek aur beti paida hogi.}

[It is in Hindi language, someday I will translate to English, someday I promise.]

It’s strange how writing can be such a release. I’ve been carrying so many feelings lately, so many that sometimes it feels like there’s no room left to breathe. But when I wrote that poem last night, it was like I let out everything I’ve been holding inside. The words came almost on their own like they were waiting to be said. I still don’t entirely understand it, but maybe I don’t need to. Maybe some things are meant to be felt and then shared, without always needing to be explained. Yesterday afternoon, while doing some research on child marriage, I sat down to read (again!) about the very inspiring Bhanwari Devi. Her story continues to haunt me and push me forward in my work. The strength she showed in her fight, despite the world turning its back on her, reminds me of the work I’m doing and the women I’m working for. Some of her words which I could also feel in the recent words of Gisèle Pelicot: 

‘it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them’

The poem, "Main, Beti — Ek Virasat Ki Saza," is my way of giving voice to a story I know all too well. And I know, if you are a girl or a woman reading, you know it too well too. I know you can feel it in your bones, in your blood, as do I. It’s about a girl, a woman, whose fate has already been written for her long before she gets a chance to choose. It’s about the generational curse of silence, suffering, and enduring an inheritance that no one would wish for. Yet, at the same time, it's a journey of resilience, of reclaiming one’s voice and challenging that very fate.

As I reread the my poem, I was also haunted by the thoughts of the young girl my mother spoke of. I think of her as I write this, and I know that even though my voice is just one of many, it has to keep speaking. It has to keep pushing for change, no matter how many obstacles or roadblocks appear. Even if no one or even one person is reading this, I have to keep writing. So, tomorrow when someone is somewhere in this spiderweb seeking some reassurance, some affirmation, some understanding, my words will be providing them.

And so, I’ll keep writing, keep fighting, keep speaking. Even when I feel lost, like I did in that ancient city in my dream, I know that the work I’m doing matters. Even though bills are pending, even though money is yet to come through, even though my shopping list is rotting in the waiting cart, even though I am unable to move out, go away from this familial swamp, even though I have zero support system, almost no safety net right now. Because, despite all of that, in some strange way, I feel like I’m not alone in it. Maybe A was in my dream for a reason. Maybe she represents the support, the comfort, and the unexpected help that comes when you least expect it. And, if I can be that to someone, anyone, then my work has achieved Nirvana! And the other figure, the one I can’t quite remember, maybe that’s a part of me that hasn’t fully come to the surface yet. Who is still figuring it all out? Either way, I’ll keep walking forward, guided by the voices of the girls and women I’m working for, and the dream that still lingers in my heart.

It’s a strange thing, how life sometimes feels like a combination of the personal, the political, and the emotional all intertwining. In my dream, I wandered lost until I found someone who reminded me of who I used to be. In my waking life, I see the same theme: finding pieces of myself in the faces of others, like the girl my mother spoke of, like the women I work with, like A, and even the figure I can’t fully place from my dream. It’s as if all of it is one long, winding journey where I’m constantly discovering and rediscovering what I care about, who I am, and how far I’m willing to go to make sure their voices are heard. Today was a reminder that even when things feel chaotic or uncertain or chronically bad, there’s a thread that runs through it all, one that I must keep following. Even when I can’t see the whole path, I trust that, like in my dream, I’ll find my way forward.

- Oizys.