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.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 8] - it was nothing serious

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 8]

Day Eight

Happy second Wednesday of Na/GloPoWriMo, everybody!

Today’s featured participant is Smita Vyas Kumar, whose response to Day Seven’s clapping/skipping prompt is a social media-themed poem that is very easy to imagine jumping rope to!

Our resource for the day is the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s “MOOC Packs” courses on How Writers Write Poetry I, and How Writers Write Poetry II. These free, online courses take you through all manner of poetic techniques, with suggested exercises and readings.

And now, here’s our optional prompt for the day! In his poem, “Poet, No Thanks,” Jean D’Amérique repeats the phrase “I wasn’t a poet” multiple times, while describing other things that he instead claims to have been. In your poem for today, use a simple phrase repeatedly, and then make statements that invert or contradict that phrase.

Happy writing!

-

note: my keyboard died this morning in either protest or prophecy. i suppose even objects have thresholds. so, courtesy of a rude little offering from the universe, i wrote this on my phone with both thumbs and a bad temper. i guess, the keyboard stopped first and the news had already done its job.

it was nothing serious

it was nothing serious,
just a sentence
coming in after dark
to sit on the edge of the bed
with its shoes on

just a sentence,
creased and ironed,
with the manners of a knife

nothing serious,
the kettle still knew what to do with itself
the sink still held last night’s cups
someone somewhere still unclipped bras from clotheslines
still salted cucumbers
still replied haha to something unforgivable

my mind, however,
went out like a bad bulb
and stayed there a while,
warm at the base, useless at the mouth,
like a prayer with nowhere decent to go

that was all

in the morning
i sat down to write
and my keyboard entered the afterlife

not all at once
first a letter
then another
then the whole small jaw of it
clenched shut
as if even the alphabet
had developed a conscience overnight
as if the letters had seen too much
and were lying face down inside themselves

it was nothing serious,
just keys refusing their little obediences
just a cheap machine discovering character
just me pressing harder
as though force had ever been a language of rescue

i did all the rituals
unplugged
replugged
cussed at it like a widow in a doorway
stared at my own reflection
in the black between keys

nothing serious,
only that stupid private humiliation
of needing one object
and not having a second one
or a third
or the kind of money that makes failure decorative
no sleek spare device sleeping nearby,
no elegant backup plan,
just me and the mean little theatre
of making do
again
as though endurance were a hobby
and not a tax

outside, the day kept misbehaving normally
a child dragged a schoolbag down the lane of morning
someone bought coriander
someone shook a rug into the sun
someone laughed from a balcony
with their full throat

i almost hated them for it,
that easy animal sound,
that unbroken ribbon of living

but hatred is expensive
and i was already spending enough
just to remain a person by breakfast

and somewhere else
no, not somewhere else
in the same world, embarrassingly,
that is the filth of it
not in some myth-country made for headlines,
but in this same stitched and sweating world
where one woman rinses rice
while another counts the windows twice
where one hand powders a child’s neck
while another learns the weight
of leaving quickly
people were holding their walls together
with their listening
people were doing that ancient human thing:
standing very still
inside the radius of a sentence

it was nothing serious
not fire yet
not the cupboard of sky kicked open
not the clean white plate learning
what ash is

just a sentence
saying an entire people could be erased
with the casual wrist of a man
who will still sleep on linen
who will still have water brought to him,
still have his collars obeyed,
still be called strategic
instead of haunted

nothing serious,
which is why the spoons looked stunned
why the window felt temporary
why even the dust
seemed to have received instructions
why the house felt briefly borrowed,
why every ordinary object
stood in its place too carefully,
as if waiting to be counted

by afternoon i gave up
and opened the smaller glass coffin
the one that glows in the palm

wrote with my thumbs
like a punished schoolgirl of the apocalypse
bent over that lit rectangle
like it was a small sanctioned fire
like it might warm me
or tell the truth
or at least not die
before i was done

letter by letter
the screen kept offering me words
with that vulgar little helpfulness
predictive text
trying to finish the end of the world for me
offering neat little next words
as if this were only inconvenience,
as if the body could be autosaved,
as if dread were just another typo

it was nothing serious

only language

only the old trick
of making annihilation sound administrative
of placing death in a sentence
and buttoning the collar over it

only language,

as though language were not
how the ceiling begins
to come down

as though language were not
the first clean glove
placed over the hand

as though language were not
how the air is thinned in advance,
how the plate is cleared,
how the bed is turned down
for the unthinkable

as though language were not
the softest part of the door
giving way

~ Oizys.

edited to add this afternote: this prompt stayed with me for reasons beyond the repetition. there is something unsettlingly familiar about a phrase that keeps denying itself, then reveals a different truth beneath it. i think a lot of us live that way in ordinary life that's misnamed, half-translated, known only in the most convenient proportions. people around me know that i write. but in the domesticated and useful sense. they know i care about language. they know i can be trusted with a title, a message, a bio, a careful sentence, a catchy headline. what they do not know is the scale on which words take hold of me. they do not know that language has been, for me, a far less tidy occupation. they do not know how thoroughly i disappear into them, or how much of my inner life has been built in rooms like this one, under another name - oizys. they do not know is that words do not behave with me. they overtake, stain and they build entire private weather systems under the skin. they do not know the extent of it, the hours, the secrecy, the strange private severity of it. they do not know that under one name i am legible, and under another i am more fully made of sentences. they know i use words well, they do not know words use me back. perhaps that is one reason this prompt found me where it did. the repeated phrase [“I wasn’t a poet”] felt less like a device and more like a way of living near a hidden self: not exactly lying, not exactly confessing, but circling something too charged to say plainly. oizys, after all, has always known more than i admit elsewhere.