NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 10] - What the emptied cup says

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 10]

Day Ten

One-third of the way through Na/GloPoWriMo already?! I guess the days go by fast when you spend them writing poems.

Our featured participant for the day is Poems by Sidra, where you’ll find that the response to Day Nine’s Marianne-Moore-inspired prompt brings us not only a poem in the voice of an animal, but a lovely and surprising opening simile.

Today’s daily resource is The Poetry Project‘s Youtube channel, where you can find videos of various readings, including the Project’s famous New Year’s Day poetry marathons.

And now, our (optional) daily prompt. In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

Happy (or at least meaningful) writing!

-

What the emptied cup says

By evening
the cup on the sill
had cooled into itself,
holding the last of the light
like something rationed.

Outside, a siren
rose and fell somewhere far enough
to be called elsewhere,
which is how ruin travels now —
first by headline, then by weather,
then by the way your hand hesitates
over ordinary things.

What did it keep?
The print of a mouth.
What did it keep?
A ring the colour of old tea,
thin as a border drawn by someone
who would never have to cross it.
What did it keep?
The habit of waiting
after the drinking was done.

I washed it gently,
as if gentleness still counted for something,
as if the water running clear
meant anything could be.

In the next building
someone was watering basil
with the concentration of prayer.
Someone somewhere still folded laundry.
Someone somewhere still unpinned
a child’s shirt from a line.
And somewhere else
dust entered a house
through the place a wall had been.

The cup said nothing.
That was the worst part.
How well it held
its small domestic shape.
How beautifully it assisted
the fiction of safety.

Even empty,
it stood there
with the obedience of an object
made to survive a table.

And I, who had only lifted it,
felt in my hand
that strange modern shame
to be alive in a room with running water,
to be grieving nothing singular,
only this vast, managed breaking
that keeps arriving
through the least defended doors.
And I, who had only lifted it,
felt in my hand
that sickening nearness
to all I had not paid for
the false comfort of being spared
how safety survives by enclosure
the quiet complicity of an intact room:
(how easily safety arranges itself
as habit, as furniture, as fact)
the lie of being untouched,
the lie of being separate,
as if safety were ever anything
but a partition held in place
by someone else’s exposure.

The cup stood still.
I did not.

Somewhere the night kept entering houses.
Somewhere names were being carried
across water, across wires, across breath.
And here, even here,
the task was not to be innocent
but to refuse the ease
of staying useless.

Guilt is only another vessel
if it sits too long.
Another thing that holds and holds
and does not pour.

So I set the cup down carefully,
as one might set down a lie
that has been useful for too many years.

~ Oizys.

Afternote: I keep returning to Mimi Kim’s reminder that: These movements also challenge the primacy of individual safety, noting that for oppressed people, the possibility of individual safety is a myth or a luxury afforded to the privileged few. The goal, rather, is liberation and can only be achieved through a collective struggle towards the radical transformation of the material conditions contributing to violence on all of its levels.

I think shame and guilt often arise when we begin to recognise our proximity to power, or our complicity within what feels like a fiction of safety. But the task is not to let that shame fester, or to mistake guilt for action. Left to sit too long, both can become static, self-enclosed, even indulgent. What matters is transforming that recognition into resistance, because our proximity to power can also be the first site of solidarity.

As Dr Nat Raha and Dr Mijke van der Drift suggest, Being open to acknowledging such complicities in these moments is a starting point for addressing difficult tensions – they are not solved simply by an analysis of social hierarchy (even if that can play a role) or by attributions of innocence and guilt. The latter are unhelpful elements in the emotional sensorium. 

What matters more is what recognition asks of us, and what we do next.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 9] - what the windowsill plant knows

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 9]

Day Nine

Happy ninth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month, all. We hope that you’re really getting into the groove of this whole poem-a-day thing!

Our featured participant today is Richard White, who brings us a poem about being (or not being) an EMT in reponse to Day Eight’s contradictory prompt.

Today’s resource is the Poetry Foundation’s collection of learning prompts, each one of which is geared toward introducing or exploring a different poetic form, mode, or concept, and then giving you a prompt to write from. If you just can’t get enough prompts, well, they’ve got a whole bunch more for you!

And that leads us to our own (optional) prompt for the day. Marianne Moore was a well-known modernist poet, with a curious taste in hats. Though she wrote on many themes, I’ve always had some affection for her many poems about – or in the voice of – animals, such as “The Fish,” “Dock Rats,” “The Pangolin,” and “No Swan so Fine.” Today, try writing your own poem in the voice of an animal or plant, or a poem that describes a specific animal or plant with references to historical events or scientific facts.

Happy writing!

-

note: this prompt and my response poem feels like it arrives in continuity with yesterday’s. yesterday, i could not stop thinking about trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” a sentence obscene in its casual scale that was widely condemned for exactly the kind of monstrous ease it carried. by night, that sentence had already found its echo in more bombardment: israel striking over 100 sites in 10 minutes across lebanon, including beirut, with major civilian casualties.
i did not want to write this directly. so i let the poem speak through a windowsill plant. i wanted the window, the watering, the small domestic witness to carry it instead. sometimes the plant on the sill understands continuity better than the headline does. some forms of horror are too large to name plainly; they have to be seen in the way a hand waters something living while the air has already changed.

-

what the windowsill plant knows

i was not placed here for history.
i was placed here for light,
for the small obedient theatre
of leaf and morning.

for a chipped saucer.
for measured water.
for the hand that comes and goes
smelling faintly of soap, onion, ink.

still, i have lived long enough by this window
to know what glass cannot do.

it keeps out some rain.
it keeps in cooking smells.
it gathers fingerprints, dusk,
the fine democratic dust
that returns after every cleaning
like an old regime.

it does not keep out sentences.

last night one entered first:
creased, official, well-fed,
with the manners of a man
who has never had to carry water upstairs.

by morning the hand that watered me
was colder than the steel tumbler beside the sink.
the water tasted faintly
of tap-metal and unfinished dread.

i drank it anyway.
i drank what I was given. 
plants and women are praised for this.

that is what roots do.
they take what arrives.
they split quietly in the dark.
they move toward moisture
even when the soil has learned
the wrong kind of memory.

outside, the neighbourhood continued
with its full ordinary vulgarity.

someone beat a rug against a railing.
someone salted cucumber.
someone argued over coriander.
someone laughed from a balcony
with all their teeth.
a child dragged a schoolbag
like a small unwilling nation.

and elsewhere,
no, not elsewhere,
that is the lie that keeps the cupboards standing,
in this same stitched world,
the air was being taught new mathematics.

not thunder.
not monsoon.
not the sky losing its temper in the old familiar way.

something faster.
more counted.
so many impacts in so little breathing room
that even silence afterward
must have arrived in pieces.

i am only a plant, yes,
but do not mistake that for innocence.

i have watched tenants change,
paint peel,
women move kitchens from one rented room to another
without ever calling it exile.
i have watched collars come and go,
maps redrawn on television,
children rise against the same wall
until their heads nearly touched the calendar gods.

i know a little about surviving
by staying put.

botanists would tell you
leaves curl under stress
to save water.
stomata close
when the air turns hostile.
roots avoid rot
but seek moisture all the same.

how human,
to call this adaptation
instead of grief with instructions.

by noon i had turned myself
a little further toward the light.
not faith.
not hope.
plants are spared that humiliation.
just habit dressed as biology.
only the old reflex:
turn, open, endure.

the window kept making
its thin ridiculous promise.
the curtain moved once
like someone trying not to be seen.

inside, rice was rinsed.
tea was boiled.
a message arrived.
another was not answered.

i kept offering leaves
to a world that keeps confusing
appetite with permission.

and when evening came,
the hand returned again:
tired, thumb-lit,
still carrying the taste of the screen.

it touched one yellowing edge of me
as though checking
whether small things
were still alive.

i did not know how to tell it
that small things are always alive
at terrible times.

that is their punishment.
that is their science.

it touched one yellowing edge of me
as if to ask whether life
was still worth the trouble.

i had no answer.
i only kept turning
toward what had not yet finished
hurting me.

~ oizys.

afternote: i wish i had posted this earlier. i started writing in the morning, but the workday unraveled (no working keyboard, no easy alternative) and i got carried away in the rush of it all. slipping like this feels like a habit; once it starts, it’s too easy to keep missing, to keep putting things off. so i had to gently push myself, no, no, almost force my own hand, just to hit publish and comment it there. 

while going through the news yesterday, of threats, of bombing, a tiny and hollow bomb of nothing dropped on me: i received zero appraisal. i had been waiting, sincerely, for the new contract. part of me believed i would be met with something bright, something affirming, maybe an appraisal of flying colours; another part of me stayed cautious and controlled, remembering how it had been before, preparing for something meagre. and to all our surprises, it was nothing. 

and i find myself sitting and rotting with that absence, feeling it spread, slow and sour, all rancid, in my rock bottom.

i have been here, at this low, for longer than i want to admit. watching a world where violence keeps unfolding, where people die children slaughtered, where women are raped. and inside all that noise, this quiet, personal erasure lands and lingers. no lesson neatly tied up, no forced brightness. just this, as it is.