NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 20th): In the Wakeful Hour

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty): What with time’s way of marching inexorably on, we suppose it was inevitable. We’ve come to the 2/3-way point of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Anna Enbom, whose tragedy/ballad poem for Day Nineteen is less tragic (thankfully) than it could be.

Today’s resource is the online galleries of the Tate Modern, where there’s oodles to discover, including a sculpture that sort of makes us think of the Loch Ness Monster holding a beach ball, a swirly bit of op/pop art reminiscent of either candy or a mustache, and this interesting exploration of five different artist-made books.

And now, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Below, you’ll find Theodore Roethke’s poem, “In Evening Air.”

In Evening Air

1
A dark theme keeps me here,
Though summer blazes in the vireo’s eye.
Who would be half possessed
By his own nakedness?
Waking’s my care–
I’ll make a broken music, or I’ll die.

2
Ye littles, lie more close!
Make me, O Lord, a last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.
Once I transcended time:
A bud broke to a rose,
And I rose from a last diminishing.

3
I look down the far light
And I behold the dark side of a tree
Far down a billowing plain,
And when I look again,
It’s lost upon the night–
Night I embrace, a dear proximity.

4
I stand by a low fire
Counting the wisps of flame, and I watch how
Light shifts upon the wall.
I bid stillness be still.
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

So, let’s face it: this poem is weird. The rhythm is odd, the rhymes are too, and the language is strangely prophetic and not at all “conversational.” Despite – or maybe because – of this, it has a hypnotic quality, as if it were all inevitable. Your challenge is, with this poem in mind, to write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration). One way to approach this is to think of a song you know and then basically write new lyrics that fit the original song’s rhythm/phrasing.

Happy writing!

In the Wakeful Hour

1
The bell is hollow bone.
It tolls beneath the nettled sky at noon.
A beetle hums in praise —
I count the hooves of days.
My hands are not my own.
They bloom in sleep and wither far too soon.

2
O ash-mouth choir, hush!
Do not sing that salt-sick song of men.
The dandelions lie —
They grin, then float, then die.
The well is full of hush.
I drank the stillness. I will drink again.

3
The ink runs backward now.
It tells the tale of something half-remembered:
A ladder made of glass,
A mirror in the grass,
A bird without a brow
That screamed of snow and was, at once, dismembered.

4
I stay beside the wall.
Its breath is warm. It mutters old regrets.
My shadow leaves at four,
Returns at dusk with more
Of me than I recall.
I am the harp that darkness never frets.

5
And moss began to speak—
It whispered through the bark with velvet breath:
“O child of cinder bone,
You walk, but not alone.
The roots remember weak—
Your name is stitched in lichen, not in death.”

6
The moonlight dripped reply,
Each syllable a gleam on trembling leaves:
“I watched you forge your fears
Into a crown of years.
You asked me not to lie—
But truth dissolves in time, like webs in eaves.”

7
Said moss: “I’ve seen you fall.
The same stone finds your foot in every path.
But still you rise, and hum
The tune from whence you come.
The stars forget it all—
But I recall your name. I know your wrath.”

8
Said moonlight: “All things pass.
Even gods are shadows in the end.
Yet still I shine. I wait.
The dusk is not your fate.
The fire sleeps in grass—
And what you break, someday you may still mend.”

9
Now silence bows its head.
The world turns in its sleep and dreams anew.
The moss reclines in thought.
The moon forgets it fought.
But still, where none have tread,
A song begins — and maybe, so do you.

10
The moss grew cold, withdrew.
Its tendrils curled like fingers in a fist.
The moonlight dimmed to bone—
A hush not quite alone.
The wind forgot it blew.
The night bent inward, heavy with a mist.

11
She came with neither cry
Nor crown — her robe was woven out of sighs.
Her hands were pale as ash,
Her feet left pools of brash
Regret. The owls flew high,
And stars looked down but would not recognize.

12
She spoke, or something did.
It might have been the sound of branches weeping.
“I gather what you lose—
The cut, the bruise, the ruse.
I keep what must be hid.
The pain you won’t admit—I’ve been there, keeping.”

13
The moonlight tried to shine,
But shimmer fails when sorrow folds the air.
And moss could only moan,
Its hymns reduced to stone.
The god—half rot, half wine—
Sat down. “You called,” she said. “You called me here.”

14
And no one said a word.
But in that silence, something cracked and bled.
A vine reached toward the fire,
A crow dropped low, then higher—
And somewhere, nearly heard,
A child sang backwards from an empty bed.

15
They called her Achlys,
A name like wind through rusted violin.
Not goddess — not quite ghost,
A flicker more than most.
She weeps in what has been,
Yet plants a spark where endings once had been.

16
And moss began to sing,
A hymn of thorns made soft by shadow’s hand.
The moonlight held its breath,
The dark stepped back from death—
While under everything,
Glimmering under the grief.

Fieldnotes from the Edge of the Unseen

This text appears to originate from a liminal grove where moss hums softly in its sleep and moonlight answers in riddles. The voice shifts: sometimes speaker, sometimes echo, sometimes witness. Meaning moves like water—never still, never certain.

At the heart of the poem is a presence not fully seen but unmistakably felt. A sorrowing figure. A name that surfaces only once: Achlys. She is the death-mist, the unspoken grief, older than memory. Rarely mentioned, never claimed. Not quite goddess, not quite ghost. She does not arrive. She is remembered.

Her most vivid appearance survives in a passing moment on the Shield of Heracles, where she is carved among the Fates and the Keres. She stands “gloomy and dread, pallid, parched, cowering in hunger,” with claws beneath her hands, blood on her cheeks, and “much dust, wet with tears” upon her shoulders.

There is no clear source. No known ritual. No record of worship. Only this: the grief sings. And under it, something glimmers.

- Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 19th): The Ballad of Liba Gray

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Nineteen): Happy Saturday, everyone. We hope you’re ready to write some poems!

Today’s featured participant is Sara Hardy, who took me back to my 1980s childhood with her driving-and -singing poem for Day Eighteen.

Our resource for the day is a bit goofy. It’s the Gallery of Strange Museums. Some of the museums here don’t strike me as all that strange – more very local or specific. But the Wingnut Museum is definitely a bit odd, as is the World’s Largest Spool of Thread (less a museum than a roadside attraction), while the Hattiesburg Pocket Museum is a testament to the fact that people can – and do – make their own fun.

And now for our daily prompt – optional as always. This one is inspired by Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song.”

The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek for “goat song.” The song in Kelly’s poem is quite literally a goat song. The poem also describes a tragedy, both in the modern sense of an awful event, and the ancient dramatic sense of a play in which someone does something terrible, and the play’s action shows the consequences.

The poem has a timeless, could-have-happened-anywhere/anywhen quality that I associate with blues and folk ballads – including murder ballads (a subgenre of song dealing with a gruesome crime, first arising from broadsheet ballads sold at English executions, and which later came to America in forms like “The Knoxville Girl” and then morphed their way into country music).

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad. One way into this prompt may be to use it to retell a family tragedy or story, or to retell a crime or tragic event that occurred in your hometown.

Happy(?) writing!

Note before you read: Ah, tragedy is right up my blog theme's alley. And, a question mark after happy and before writing.

The Ballad of Liba Gray

They say she walked the orchard rows
In slippers made of lace,
With apple blossoms in her hair
And thunder on her face.
The rebbe swore she warned him once,
The blacksmith knew her cry —
She vanished when the frost came in,
Beneath a burning sky.

Her father owned the cider mill,
A drinker hard and mean.
He’d crush the apples with a curse
And never once came clean.
They found his boots by Sender’s Pond
The night the frostwind blew —
And all they saw was Liba’s shawl,
The rest the cattails knew.

The shamas spoke to Mrs. Blum
Who lived behind the hill.
She said she saw Liba flee
Her hands like winter chill.
The barn went up in flame that night,
No cause they could explain,
But on the wind they swore they heard
A mourner's song that turned to rain.

Now every year when harvest comes
And cider foams and flows,
The children say Liba walks
Where no cornflower grows.
And if you hear a fiddle wail
Past Sender’s Pond at night,
You best not look — just bow your head —
And keep the firelight bright.

- Oizys.