NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 13] - in my village, even the ground refuses me

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 13]

Day Thirteen

Here in the Land of Na/GloPoWriMo, the thirteenth day of the month isn’t ominous — not when it means another chance to write poems!

Today, our featured participant is verlie burroughs, who brings us a bittersweet response to Day Twelve’s memory-of-a-relative prompt.

Our resource for the day is the Poets House blog, where you’ll find tons of interviews with contemporary poets.

To get started with today’s prompt, first read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe. Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.

Happy writing!

-

in my village, even the ground refuses me

the soil doesn’t hold my footprint,
it loosens, as though i were never meant
to weigh upon it

the well water tastes like someone else’s name,
cool on the tongue,
but it will not answer when i call myself

the courtyard echoes, but not for me,
it returns a boy i have never been

my father walks differently here,
his voice bending at the edges,
as though some older mouth remembers it better

he is less a man
and more a son again

and my grandfather,

he sits in a forgetting that began before me,
his gaze passing through my body
like a wind that does not care for doors

he forgot me
before i could learn the grammar of his hands

so i too became forgettable

o place that claims me:
thou speakest in a blood i cannot hear

i press my ear to the earth,
but it hums with another lineage

and i;
unheld, unnamed, unreturned;

stand where i am from

and fail, still,
to arrive

as if arrival
were meant for someone else

the earth
not answering back
and does not arrive.

~ Oizys.

- 

note: i almost missed today. i started writing in the morning, right after the prompt arrived in my mail. but then work engulfed me, then sickness, then household chores, then more work, then cooking, then just… stress piling on. and now, after finally finishing my nightly rituals and tucking myself into bed, i realized my poem was still sitting there... half-done, probably infested with mosquitoes by now. so i picked it back up and finished it with whatever i had left in me. because i really don’t want to break the streak haha.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12] - the oldest woman i remember

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12]

Day Twelve

Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twelve of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Today, our featured participant is Kavya Janani U, who brings us a forbiddingly calm response to Day Eleven’s erasure/blackout prompt. It’s very interesting to contrast here the blacked-out text with the original text.

Our daily resource is this essay by the poet Yuki Tanaka on (mis)translation and how unusual or surprising word choices can make a poem come alive.

Finally, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Happy writing!

-

the oldest woman i remember

i remember her almost by furniture.

my grandmother’s grandmother,
my motherline made visible
for one brief afternoon,
sat on a chair
in the village house 
as if she had always been there

while my parents moved through the day
with their younger noise
and my grandmother,
not yet memory herself,
stood nearby,
already practiced
in the old labour of attending.

i was too small
to understand any of it,
to know what it meant
that my grandmother came from her
and i came from my grandmother.

i was too small
to understand lineage,
to understand what it meant
to come from women
who came from women
who came from women.

i was too small
to know what it meant
to belong to so many women at once.

i was too small to know
that a girl first learns womanness
by watching
how women are in a room,
how they sit,
how they wait,
how they are spoken to.

i only knew
that everyone seemed to know
how to place themselves around her.

i do not remember her voice.
i do not remember
the colour of her garment,
the month, the weather,
what anyone said to her.

only this:
she sat there
with such finished stillness
that the whole room
seemed to take its shape from her.

the chair was ordinary.
that is what stays with me.

not carved, not holy,
not ceremonial, not special,
not even remarkable enough
for a child to love at once.
just a chair,
and in it
a woman who had lived long enough
to stop explaining her right
to take up space,
to make quiet look ancestral.

she sat the way
very old trees stand:

very still.
not stiff.
not resting either.
just there.

i think now
that this is part of how womanness arrived to me:

not through mirrors,
not through bangles,
not through the first blood,
not through the first warning,
but through old women,
in the sight of old women
whose bodies had become
archives of use,
what life had asked of them
and what life had done to them,

who sat as if tiredness
proved they had carried something,

who sat with the tiredness
of women who had done everything asked of them
and more,

who took up space
without making anyone comfortable,
without needing to brighten it,
without smiling for it,
without softening age
into something pretty.

she is dead.
my grandmother is dead.
and still the line continues,
not neatly, 
definitely not kindly,
but definitely in gestures.

and now, years later,
she returns to me
whenever i see an old woman
lower herself carefully into a chair,
whenever an older woman
takes the edge of a room
and somehow still changes the whole room,
whenever i find myself sitting quietly
at family gatherings,
watching more than speaking,
as if the mothers before me
left instructions in the spine,
as if i had been taught this
without anyone teaching me.

in the way i enter a house
already measuring its silences.
in the way i watch women’s hands
before i trust their words.
in the way i have learned
that to endure is also
a language passed down.

perhaps that was what she did
that has not stopped echoing:

she sat there
so fully in her place
that a little girl, passing through,
could carry the shape of it away
without knowing,
without understanding,
what it meant
to belong to women:

to their hush,
their labour,
their vanishing,
their unspectacular thrones

and carried that shape away
in her body.

~ Oizys.