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.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 12th): Symphony of Longing

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twelve): Welcome back, all you poets, for Day Twelve of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Christine Smart, whose lyrically-inspired villanelle for Day Eleven may make you . . . not want to read the news.

Our daily resource is the collection of the American Visionary Art Museum. Focused on outsider art – which is sort of like folk art’s more bonkers cousin – the museum describes itself as “one small speck in a Bling Universe where art reflects life, both literally and figurately.” I’m not exactly sure what a “Bling Universe” is, but it appears to include automatons featuring bathtubs filled with spaghetti, video tutorials for making sock monkeys, and kinetic sculpture races. Good times!

And after all those shenanigans we, we bring you a very serious (or is it?) optional prompt. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” It’s a complex poem that not only heavily features the idea of music, but is structured like a symphony. Its four sections, like symphonic movements, play with and expand on an overall theme, using the story of Susannah and the Elders as a backdrop.

Try writing a poem that makes reference to one or more myths, legends, or other well-known stories, that features wordplay (including rhyme), mixes formal and informal language, and contains multiple sections that play with a theme. Try also to incorporate at least one abstract concept – for example, desire or sorrow or pride or whimsy.

Happy writing!

Backdrop

Ah, now that’s a challenge I can tune into. A poem with myth and music, grief and groove, structure and strangeness. I had fun with this. Lots of fun, as you can see. My first thought was to go with Orpheus (I wrote a bit, maybe I will publish it as a second response...?) but I decided to stick to my blog theme and persona:  

Myth of Oizys: Goddess of Misery – Greek personification of Misery. Rarely invoked directly in myth, which makes her perfect to be my haunting, half-seen muse. Here, she’s not just sorrow. She’s a kind of dissonant prayer, a force that demands to be felt but never fully explained.  

Gilgamesh & Enkidu – Of course pulled from The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving literary works. Their story is one of loss and longing, of a hero who tries to outpace death and fails. Enkidu’s death is the axis around which Gilgamesh spins and the poem taps into that as a symbol of longing’s first true note. 

Theme: Longing – Longing as grief, as beauty, as ache, as beat like those old, cracked lines that still hum beneath our feet.  

Tone – If Stevens wrote jazz with the bones of the classics, this is a little midnight blues riff on his tune with some underworld smoke in the keys.

Symphony of Longing

I. PRELUDE IN DUSK MINOR 
(a setting, soft and sly)

The dusk came loping in like grief with lipstick,
Trailing Oizys behind her, barefoot and bitter.
She hummed in fifths,
a dissonant kind of honey—
low like cello strings grumbling through molasses.

In Uruk's ruined courts, Gilgamesh still weeps,
palming stone tablets like forgotten lovers.
He knows:
even kings with names etched into time
must kneel to the hunger of night.

“I built the walls,” he says,
“but they do not keep out dream.”
And what is dream,
if not a symphony we misremember upon waking?

II. SCHERZO FOR A DAUGHTER OF NIGHT

(a wild dance, crooked but clear)

Oizys dances —
a sharp-heeled pas de deux on the bones of stars.
She's laughing in half-rhymes:

blister, sister / rue, undo / fate, too late.

Her breath smells like attic dust and half-read letters.

You can’t court a goddess like her.
You endure her.
You let her hang her coat in your ribs
and call it “home.”

She speaks:

“Desire is a jackal dressed in velvet.
Feed it once, and it names you meal.”

Still, we follow her music —
spilled like wine
on the floor of some dim-lit bar
where myth and man
sip gin together, wincing with every swallow.

III. ADAGIO FOR THE UNSAID

(slower now, intimate)

There’s a silence between lovers
that tastes like copper and myth.

Here, Oizys kneels beside Enkidu’s grave.
She doesn’t cry —
her tears calcified centuries ago
into opals of ache.

She strokes the dust and speaks in whispers
so old they can only be heard
by those who’ve lost something unnamed.

“Grief,” she murmurs,
“is the twin of longing.
One looks back,
the other forward—
and both wear your face.”

She hums again —
this time, a lullaby:
three notes, descending.
Not unlike falling.

IV. FINALE: VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF ACHE

(resolve, or something like it)

And what remains, after music has gone?
After myth folds its wings
and the last chord chokes in silence?

We remain.
Tuning our bones
to the rhythm of longing.
Still naming the stars
after the ones who left.

Oizys smiles, faintly —
a flicker, like candlelight remembering its purpose.
She slips into our dreams,
not as villain,
but muse.

Gilgamesh, old now,
carves one last note into the stone:

“To long is to live twice.”

And so the symphony plays on—
not in halls,
but in hearts,
where the strings hum
and ache
is music
we dare to remember.

- Oizys.