NaPoWriMo 2026 [2nd April] - Left of the Courtyard

NaPoWriMo 2026 [2nd April]

Day Two

Welcome back for the second day of Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone. We hope you feel invigorated after the first day of the challenge. And my apologies to those of you who had comments marked as spam yesterday — sometimes whatever algorithm Disqus uses to flag spam gets a wee bit over-enthusiastic!

Our featured participant today is aetherianessence, where you’ll find a response to Day One’s prompt that shows you just how much feeling the small form of the tanka can accommodate.

Today’s resource is the nineteenth century poet and critic Matthew Arnold’s essay, “The Study of Poetry.” Arnold believed that the fundamental purposes of poetry were to uplift and console. Do you agree? Maybe you think it should annoy or perplex? I’m somewhat partial to the idea of poems as little puzzles with surprises in them, or doorways into unfamiliar ways of thinking. And I find Arnold’s thesis a little strange given that “Dover Beach,” one of his most famous poems, ends in such an unsettling way.

Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Happy writing!

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I remember the courtyard of my grandmother's
how the red oxide floor held the day’s heat
long after the sun had gone—
a slow-burning memory under bare feet.

I remember the courtyard of my grandmother's
smelling faintly of wet earth and iron,
the hand pump groaning like an old man
who had seen too much.

The hand pump coughed up water
the color of old coins,
and I would rinse my palms
as if I had done something wrong.

From the kitchen,
the smell of tea.
From the mud oven across the street,
the waft of baked biscuits.

Ma would call my name from inside,
like it belonged to her more than me,
her voice stretched thin with evening,
and I would pretend not to hear,
counting the cracks in the cement
as if they were maps.

Somewhere, a TV flickered, 
grainy voices slipping through the walls,
men speaking too fast,
maps I couldn’t understand
flashing and vanishing.

I didn’t know the names then,
only that the adults grew quieter
when those voices came on,
as if sound itself had become fragile.

Across the lane,
boys argued over a cracked bat,
declaring rules, breaking them,
starting again like it mattered.

Across the lane,
boys shouted over a plastic ball,
bright, careless laughter
that didn’t belong to me.

I watched from the gate,
one hand curled around rusted iron,
feeling... strangely... 
that I had already stepped away.

Not lonely.
Just… elsewhere.

I wasn’t sad.
That’s the strange part.

Just aware...
in the way children sometimes are...
that I was standing slightly
to the left of my own life.

As if the world was larger
than this lane, this house, this evening,
and also somehow more broken
than anyone was saying out loud.

That one day
I would learn the weight of those silences,
how whole cities can disappear
between sentences on the news,

how people continue cooking dinner
while something far away
is ending.

And still...
the pump would groan,
the biscuits would crisp in oven,
the boys would shout over nothing.

That one day
I would leave this place
without ever quite leaving it,

carrying its quiet
like a second spine,
invisible, necessary,

and a question
I still haven’t answered:
whether I chose solitude,

or it chose me first.

And I would stand there,
already practicing
how to belong and not belong
at the same time.

~ Oizys.

Afternote: This poem comes from a place I didn’t fully understand as a child, where I was just watching, but not quite belonging; present, but already leaning away. Memory is rarely just memory. It carries what was visible and what wasn’t. Like the speaker in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Pittsylvania County,” I wasn’t envious of what I saw around me. If anything, I was aware, too early, perhaps, that life could unfold in ways I wasn’t sure I wanted. As a child, I didn’t have the language for what flickered through television screens or settled into the silences of adults. But I understood, in fragments, that the world extended beyond my courtyard in ways that were not always gentle. There was comfort in those evenings, yes. But also a quiet, persistent sense that the world was larger, stranger, and carrying things no one spoke about directly. This poem holds that contradiction: the ordinary rhythm of evening; tea, voices, play; and the faint, persistent awareness that elsewhere, something irreversible was unfolding. Looking back, I think that distance I felt wasn’t emptiness. It definitely was perceived as emptiness or hollowness by society. But, it was the beginning of attention, you know, the kind that doesn’t turn away, even when it doesn’t yet understand. I didn't know it then, and had innocently labelled it as a quality of a misfit but that distance I felt wasn't absence at all, rather it was recognition of a life both intimate and incomplete, of a world that extended far beyond what I could name, of a self already learning how to witness, before it could fully belong. I think this was one of the first times I recognized the shape of the person I might become: someone who stands slightly apart, noticing what slips through the cracks: both at home, and far beyond it.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [1st April] - While Everything Continues

NaPoWriMo 2026 [1st April]

Go!

Yay! April 1 is here again, and so is our yearly poetry writing adventure. Whether you’re new to Na/GloPoWriMo or an old pro, the basics remain the same. Write a poem a day for the month of April, and have fun!

Each day, you’ll find here a new featured participant and daily resource. We’ll also have an optional daily prompt for those of you who find yourself in need of a little inspiration (or just like the additional challenge). If you’d like to get the prompts by email, just click on the title of this post, and you’ll be taken to a page that has an email-subscription form (as well as the comments section for today!)

If you’ll be posting your work to a website or blog, feel free to submit the URL for our list of participants’ sites, using the “submit your site” link at the top of the page. And if you like to link to your daily efforts, the comments section for each day’s post is a great place to do that. Agai, just click on the title to the daily post, and you’ll be whisked away to a page full of friendly folks that link or post their daily poems and do a lovely job of cheering one another on.

And so, without further ado, our featured participant for the day is Rahul Gaur, who brings us a meditation on holiness in response to our early bird prompt.

Our first daily resource is the Youtube channel for the University of California at Berkeley’s “Lunch Poems” reading series. Here, you can watch and listen to readings from a wide range of contemporary poets.

And now, here is our (optional) prompt for the day! The tanka is an ancient Japanese poetic form. In contemporary English versions, it often takes the shape of a five-line poem with a 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7 syllable-count – kind of like a haiku that decided to keep going.

Some recent examples include L. Lamar Wilson’s “Aubade Tanka,” Tarik Dobbs’s “Commuter Tanka,” and Antoinette Brim-Bell’s “Insomniac Tankas.” And here’s a sort of parody tanka by Paul Violi, which starts out with the kind of cliché image that you might find in a thousand imitations of classic Japanese poetry, and ends up somewhere very different. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own tanka – or multi-tanka poem. Theme and tone are up to you, but try to maintain the five-line stanza and syllable count.

Happy writing!

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Note: This is my offering for 1st April. I tried to capture the quiet, unnerving throughline, that is, how our routine is a soft insulation blanket over something (read:everything) rotting underneath.

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While Everything Continues

Morning kettle hums
steam fogs the quiet window
someone checks the news
scrolls past a burning city
like skipping an ad break reel

Bus brakes sigh again
a man counts coins twice over
exact fare, no more
sirens thread through traffic lights
no one turns their head today

Lunchbox clicks open
rice clumps in familiar ways
fingers move, not eyes
a headline folds into crumbs
salt tastes slightly metallic

A child ties her shoe
double knot, then tighter still
mother says be quick
across the road, a shutter
half-down, half-deciding, still

Office lights flicker
someone laughs at something small
keys keep tapping on
a name mispronounced somewhere
then corrected into dust

Evening news murmurs
volume kept politely low
plates scrape, water runs
“it’s complicated,” they say
and pass the breadbox along

Night settles gently
locks clicked out of habit now
curtains drawn with care
far away, a door kicked in
no one wakes up here now

~ Oizys.

After-note: Meditation 17 is a prose sermon by John Donne, written in 1624 as part of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a series of reflections he composed during a serious illness. It reflects on human interconnectedness, mortality, and the illusion of separateness. The famous lines: “No man is an island … never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” suggest that no suffering is truly distant or irrelevant; every loss diminishes us, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. I kept returning to this idea while writing the poem... the quiet contradiction between knowing we are connected, and living as if we are not. Here is that excerpt:

"No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were;  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." 

- John Donne. [Source]