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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy writing!

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

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

I. The Tuning Fork Years

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

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

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

II. The Chorus We Never Wrote

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

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

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

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

III. Dad, Allegro Appassionato

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

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

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

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

IV. Sibling, Countermelody

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

Still, we rehearse.
Still, we sing.

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

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

V. Coda: The Only Living Voice

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

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

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

- Oizys.

It’s a diagnosis of generational grief, disguised in silk and razor wire.

[We Don’t Live Here Anymore]

Tonight the ceiling drips metaphors. But I’ve started writing back.

We’re four rusted gears in a machine that feeds on its own friction.
A father, a mother, two children — not quite enemies, not quite allies — just variables in an endless equation of hurt.
Sometimes it’s A hurting B, then B hurting C.
But most nights, it’s all of us rerouting pain like old electricity, flickering through exposed wires.

No one hits anymore — not visibly — not with hands. But silence slaps. Indifference cuts. Anger slices. Love? It watches.
And the worst part? We’ve all learned the choreography.

It’s in the way Ma pours tea like a truce.
In the way Baba pretends the TV is louder than our silences.
In how my sibling and I pass sarcasm like heirlooms — delicate, sharpened.

We orbit each other like broken, wounded moons — bound by all scar tissue, guilt and gravity, pretending this is what families do. Collapsing.

Every meal is a ritual in denial — spoons clink like nervous ticks, and no one mentions what happened yesterday, or ten years ago.

Some nights, I think we take turns being the villain — not because we want to, but because the story demands it.

Love, in this house, is inherited like an old cough — familiar, unhealed, echoing down generations.

If A blames B, and B blames C, and C blames D, and D blames A — does the circle break, or just become tighter?

Each room could represent a different phase of pain.

The kitchen is where forgiveness is faked.

Monsoon here smells like old arguments — humid, unresolved.

The bedroom — secrets — the breath held between confessions — where whispers curdle into silence — where touch remembers what the mouth forgets — where silence nests in the folds of bedsheets — where nightmares wear familiar voices — where the past slips under the pillow, still warm — the only room where truth dares to undress — and still hides — inherited and unspoken — tucked in like lullabies no one dares to finish.

The hallway — avoidance — the stretch of silence between fights  — where eyes glance but never meet — where footsteps mean more than words — where voices trail off before they reach the door — where anger cools but never disappears — where guilt passes guilt in passing — where apologies are rehearsed but never spoken — the path between rooms, but never resolution — a liminal space, always waiting — the place where we forget, then remember, then pretend again.

Even the light switches know which wounds to avoid. We don’t live here anymore — we haunt. 

I remember once — Ma laughing so hard at a movie she snorted tea through her nose.
Baba didn’t laugh, but he smiled like it was a secret he hoped no one would notice.
That moment lives somewhere under all this static. I think.

I wonder if one day I’ll pour tea like a truce too.
If my children will flinch at the sound of spoons.
If trauma is something we pass down with the furniture.

Some arguments from 2007 still echo through these walls. But so do I.
The ghosts here don’t wear sheets — they wear old t-shirts and smell like guilt and shampoo.
I can't tell if I'm 12 again or just stuck.

Maybe one day I’ll write about healing.
Today, I needed to remember the architecture of hurt.

I didn’t write this for closure.
I wrote it because the house won’t stop echoing.

I write this not to exorcise it, but to remember which ghosts are mine.
Or.
There is no moral. Only memory.

- Oizys.

P.S. - This one wrote itself like a bruise forming beneath the skin. It’s not a story. It’s a map of echoes, grief, and the things we inherit even when we don’t want to. Some houses hold furniture. Others hold echoes. This one holds both.