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,
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.
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.
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}