NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 23rd): Aria at Dawn

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

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

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

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

Happy writing!

Aria at Dawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

It silences even the breeze.

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

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

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

- Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 22nd): After the Storm, the Ritual

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty-Two): Welcome back, everyone, for the twenty-second day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Our featured participant today is Cutting Hail, who brings us not just one poem in response to Day 21’s “instructional” prompt, but three!

Today’s daily resource is the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, Italy. If you are at all interested in Renaissance Italian masters, it’s the right place to get an eyeful of Titians, Caravaggios, Botticellis, Canallettos, and da Vincis.

And now for today’s optional prompt! Did you take music lessons as a child? Despite having all the musical talent of a dried-out lemon, I took two years of piano lessons. I was required to practice for half an hour a day, and showed my disgruntlement by playing certain very annoying songs – like Turkey in the Straw – over and over, as loudly as possible. But while I thought of the lessons as a kind of torture, I’m glad as an adult to have taken them – if only for the greater dexterity it gave to my hands!

In her poem, Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons, Diane Wakoski is far more grateful than I ever managed to be, describing the act of playing as a “relief” from loneliness and worry, and as enlarging her life with something beautiful. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something you’ve done – whether it’s music lessons, or playing soccer, crocheting, or fishing, or learning how to change a tire – that gave you a similar kind of satisfaction, and perhaps still does.

Happy writing!

Some Context? I often find myself searching for a god-like figure, but I get lost somewhere between emotion and intellect. So instead, I return to the rituals that anchor me: writing out the noise in my head, chopping vegetables with intention, the quiet grace of a hot shower, and curling up in bed with a book. These moments are simple, ordinary even, but they carry a sacred kind of peace for me (and, I believe, for many others). They are the temple I return to when everything else feels like chaos.

After the Storm, the Ritual

Some days, the world is a tangled earphone, knots of thought, unsaid things looping in my head like a bad remix.  So I write. Not for beauty. Not for form. But to lay the noise down flat, press it onto paper until it stops screaming.  Then, I move to the kitchen. It’s just me and the onions now. Their layers fall like small truths— a rhythm, a purpose, a little salt in my eye to remind me I’m here.  The sizzle of garlic in the pan is applause. And I stir the pot like a witch brewing peace.  Later, a hot shower: my tiny waterfall. Soap becomes absolution. Lotion becomes armor. And the bed welcomes me like it’s been saving my shape.  Book in hand, tea in cup, chores done, mind quiet— this is temple.  - Oizys.