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]

NaPoWriMo 2026 [31st March: Early-Bird Prompt] - Receipt, or Something Like It

NaPoWriMo 2026 [31st March: Early-Bird Prompt] 

Get set...

It’s March 31, or as we like to call with around here, Na/GloPoWriMo Eve. A time when poetic spirits haunt the land, preparing for their month of fun…

Tomorrow, we’ll have for you our first daily resource and featured participant, as well as a daily prompt. In the meantime, here’s an early-bird prompt for those of you whose geographic relationship with the international date line means that April 1 arrives a bit earlier than it does at National/Global Poetry Writing Month HQ.

Start by reading Katie Naughton’s poem, “Debt Ritual: Oysters.” Now, write your own poem in which you refer to a specific writer or artist (or work of literature/art) and make a declarative statement about want or desire. Set the poem in a particular, people-filled place, like a restaurant, bus station, museum, school, etc.

Happy writing!

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Note: I almost did not write today. But that seems to be the theme lately. Almost doing things, almost showing up, almost being present, almost doing it. So I am interrupting that pattern, even if only slightly. This is for the early-bird prompt.

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Receipt, or Something Like It

At a small restaurant
with metal tables that remember too many elbows,
I sit across from conversations that are not mine.

Plates arrive, leave, return half-eaten—
like decisions people could not fully commit to.

Someone laughs too loudly behind me.
Someone is breaking up near the window.
The waiter writes quickly,
as if speed could prevent anything from spilling over.

I think of Sylvia Plath,
and how she made even hunger sound precise.

I wanted that.
As a child.

Not the tragedy.
Not the spectacle people romanticize afterwards.
But the sharpness.

I wanted language that did not hesitate.
I wanted to say what I mean
before it rot inside me.

The spoon hits the glass beside me;
a small, accidental declaration.

I wanted to respond on time.

Not hours later,
not days later,
not in the quiet safety of a page,

but there,
in the moment the boundary is crossed.

At the next table,
someone says “it’s not that serious,”
and everyone nods like agreement is easier than truth.

I wanted to disagree.

The bill arrives.
Numbers arranged neatly
as if everything can be accounted for.

But there is always something unpaid,
something carried out
without being written down.

I leave before finishing my food.

I want to stop leaving things unfinished.

Outside,
the evening is loud with people
who seem to know exactly where they are going.

I stand there for a moment longer than necessary.

I want to belong to my own decisions.

And for once,
I do not take that statement back.

~ Oizys.