NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 18] - At the Governor’s Ball, the Second Daughter Refuses the Waltz

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 18]

Day Eighteen

Welcome back, everybody, for Day Eighteen of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is My Fresh Pages, which brings us an Emily Dickinson-inspired response to Day 17’s “favorite poem” prompt. I love the use of an automotive simile to describe the wren in the poem!

Today’s resource is the Faber Poetry Podcast. During its three seasons, the podcast’s presenters interviewed poets on issues ranging from fatherhood to ecology to teenage crushes.

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). When I was growing up, there was a book of poems in my house (I believe it was The Best Loved Poems of the American People) that was heavy on long, maudlin, narrative poems with lots and lots of rhyme – the sort of verse that used to be parodied on Bulwinkle’s Corner. As the twentieth century rolled in, poems like this were relegated to the status of stuff-schoolkids-were-forced-to-memorize, and they plummeted even further into our cultural memory-hole as learning poems by heart fell out of educational currency. But while some work in this style is extremely cringeworthy (I’m looking at you, “Bingen on the Rhine”), they can also be very fun to read. Take, for example, Sadakichi Hartmann’s “The Pirate,” or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” The action is dramatic, there’s lots of emotions, and the imagery is striking.

Today, we don’t challenge you to write all of a long, dramatic, narrative poem, but we invite you to try your hand at writing a poem that could be a section or piece of one. Include rhyme, include unlikely and dramatic scenes (maybe a poem about a bank robbery! Or an avalanche! Or Roman gladiators! Or an enormous ball held by mermaids, where there is an undercurrent (hee) of palace intrigue!) Basically, a poem with the plot of an opera (evil twins! Egyptian tombs! Star-crossed lovers! Tigers for no apparent reason!)

Happy writing!

-

At the Governor’s Ball, the Second Daughter Refuses the Waltz

They lit the palace like a wound in gold,
each chandelier a disciplined sun,
and all the women entered, bright and cold,
as if obedience could be outdone.

The musicians tuned their small and silver knives.
The floor shone back whatever it was shown.
The men arrived accompanied by wives,
or titles, which are much the same in tone.

I wore the family rubies at my throat,
those patient drops inherited through fear;
my mother pinned them on me like a note
that said: be good. be still. be wanted here.

Across the hall, beneath the painted dome
where cherubs looked suspiciously well-fed,
my sister moved as if the room were home,
as if no woman ever learned to dread

the careful theatre of being seen,
the curtsey like a hinge, the smile a lock,
the way a girl is polished to a sheen
and set among the crystal and the clock.

Outside, the horses stamped against the frost.
Inside, the powdered courtiers drank and lied.
A duke laughed loudly over what was lost
that year in war, as though men’s sons had died

for something noble, something clean and starred,
not maps redrawn by fingers fat with rings.
The generals spoke of sacrifice. How hard
it is, they said, to govern living things.

And then the doors flew open. Not with grace.
Not with announcement. Not with measured art.
The wind came first and struck the room’s white face.
The candles leaned as if they had a heart.

Behind it came the rider, mud to knee,
his horse all foam, his mouth a ruined bell:
the southern gate is ash. the granary
is gone. the watchmen burned. the governor fell.

I heard it passed between the servants first—
not news, but number: sixty million, low,
as if the mouth must learn to carry worst
things softly, so the upper rooms won’t know.

No one moved first. That is the old design.
Catastrophe must wait its turn in silk.
A lady dropped her fan. A glass of wine
tilted and bled itself into the milk-

pale tablecloth. The musicians stood
with bows suspended over their small crimes.
I thought: so this is how they say the flood
arrives—between two very proper rhymes.

My sister’s hand found mine beneath the lace.
For one strange moment neither of us bowed.
The room looked smaller than my mother’s face.
The men looked softer saying not aloud

what every woman there had always known:
that power is a costume stitched by need,
that every throne is only borrowed bone,
that fire can also be a form of read-

ing, yes, a way of moving through a lie,
of sounding out the weak place in the wall.
The rider swayed. The orchestra went dry.
Somewhere below us servants heard it all

and kept on carrying the sugared trays,
the lamb, the figs, the cream, the sugared pears.
This is the way the world survives its blaze:
someone still folds the napkins, mends the tears.

The duke said, Lock the gates. The bishop, Pray.
My mother whispered, Child, adjust your glove.
My sister laughed then, not in a pretty way,
but like a woman done confusing love

with being handled. Done with being neat.
Done with mistaking silence for good breeding.
She stepped into the middle of the heat
where all the candles shook with sudden reading.

No, she said. Only that. A little word.
A sparrow-word. A word to fit the mouth.
And yet the whole ridiculous room heard
the hinge snap open somewhere in the south.

Then all at once the windows seemed too thin.
The gilded mirrors lost their appetite.
The music, which had waited to begin,
lay on the air like something not quite right.

I took the rubies from my obedient throat.
They left a row of small and cooling marks.
My mother looked at me as at a boat
unfastening itself from family darks.

We did not run. It was more grave than that.
We walked, as women do when watched by men,
through broken light, through scandal, silk, and chat,
past portraits who would not survive till ten.

Behind us rose the old, astonished noise
of men discovering history has teeth.
Ahead: the courtyard, horses, frost, and choice,
and somewhere under all of it, beneath

the ash, the smoke, the law, the family name,
the smaller life they had prepared for each:
a gate ungoverned now by fear or shame,
a night enormous and not out of reach.

So let them keep the ballroom and the throne,
the chandelier, the treaties, and the dove.
I have seen empires tremble at one tone
too plain for flattery, too bare for love.

And if by morning all of this is lost—
the palace, title, ruby, waltz, and wall—
still let it first be written: at the frost-
lit hour of fire, we did not dance at all.

~ Oizys.

Note: Today’s prompt wanted drama, rhyme, and something with the plot of an opera, which is frankly dangerous to hand to someone already preoccupied with rooms, power, and women being arranged decoratively. So naturally I ended up with a ballroom, a small rebellion, and the usual trouble with inheritance. Apparently even when I try to write theatrically, I still write about hierarchy in a dress.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 17] - After the door, the map, the mirror

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 17]

Day Seventeen

Happy Friday, all! I hope you find that writing poetry is a great entry-way into your weekend.

Today, our featured participant is Adam J Scarborough, who brings us a wonderfully disorienting haiku in response to Day 16’s prompt.

Our resource for the day is The Walt Whitman Archive, where you’ll find all manner of material related to Walt Whitman, one of America’s most celebrated and — let’s be frank — unusual poets.

And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:

Crimson pepper pod!
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.

For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

Happy writing!

-

Note: For Day Seventeen, my offering is a response-poem braided from Dickinson, Rich, and Plath, with yesterday’s half-room still refusing to leave me alone.

After the door, the map, the mirror

After Emily Dickinson Leaves the Door Ajar

Because I could not be vast,
the room kept half of me.

Not death.
Not exactly.
Only its smaller clerks:

domestic decree,
the polite partition,
the inherited hush
buttoned up the throat.

Emily,
you made a corridor
out of a dash.
I live there now—

between said and unsaid,
between mine and permitted,
between the bed’s thin grammar
and the wall’s good manners.

A woman learns quickly
what must not clang.

even grief, here,
must enter sideways.

The window does not open.
It concedes.
The door is not locked.
It has simply been trained
to hesitate.

And I,
so long instructed
in the etiquette of less,

have become excellent
at folding.

the body into corner,
the sentence into smoke,
the wanting into something
that passes for discipline.

After Adrienne Rich, Dividing the Room

The room was split before I entered it.
Someone had already done the thinking.

One half for use.
One half for permission.
Enough remainder to hold a girl
until she mistakes arrangement
for character.

Adrienne,
I was taught to call this ordinary.

To say
the wall is just a wall,
the smaller portion merely practical,
the narrowing of self
a household skill.

But language leaves fingerprints.

What is allocated
is never innocent.
What is shared
is not always mutual.
What is kept “for now”
has a way of becoming
the architecture of a life.

So yes, Adrienne,
I have read the maps.
I know borders arrive first
in furniture,
in lowered voices,
in who gets the window,
in who learns to live
as though leftover space
were a kind of love.

The room says nothing.
Power rarely has to.

After Sylvia Plath, Entering The Room

You wrote of certain slants.
I know them too.

The room enters the body.

Not as flame.
Not as spectacle.
More intimate than that.

A slow white pressure.
A neatness with teeth.
The mirror holding my face
like an accusation
filed and refiled
under daughter,
under woman,
under manageable.

The curtains do not flutter.
They supervise.
The cupboard swells
with its patient jaw.
Even the pillow knows
how to keep a secret
pressed flat.

Sylvia,
here nothing dramatic happens.
That is the drama. 

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (entry dated April 17, 1956)

April again.
Morning again.
Morning comes anyway.
I gather my limbs
as though from poorer ground.
The body rises here
less like waking
than being recalled
to an arrangement
it did not survive.
The old labour of rising
as if from a grave
into a room
already waiting
to resume its claims.
Morning, and again
the small exhumation of self.
Limb by limb,
I assemble obedience
from the graveyard shift
of sleep.

A life can be halved
without blood.
A mind can be trained
to sit in its designated portion
and call that poise.

By afternoon,
light enters
like a verdict.
silence is laid out
white as a sickbed.
the soul—if that is still
the word for it—
bruises quietly
against its assigned perimeter.

No carriage waits.
No clean rebellion either.

Only the old arrangement:
one portion for breathing,
one for obedience,
and a narrow seam between
through which the mind
keeps trying
to escape unfollowed.

~ Oizys.

Afternote: I came across an article about Toni Morrison today, who once said, rather sharply, with a kind of necessary impatience, “Don’t do that. Don’t write about your little life.” I have been thinking about that sentence all day. This poem begins in the half-room, but I hope it does not stay there as mere confession or anecdotal. Rooms are never only rooms. They are blueprints of hierarchy, rehearsals of obedience, small domestic states where power learns to appear natural. So I hoped this poem could extrapolate from the room-cage outward: toward lands partitioned, peoples pushed onto the smaller side of history, and the brutal interruption of continuity, memory, and inheritance that follows when a place is carved up by force.