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.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 11] - weekend erasure

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 11]

Day Eleven

We made it to the weekend, everyone, and to the eleventh day of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Today’s featured participant is A.J.S., who brings us a mysterious and surreal response to Day Nine’s grief prompt.

Our resource for the day is Frank Skinner’s poetry podcast. Here, the English comedian and actor analyzes his favorite poems and interviews contemporary poets.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

Happy writing (or erasing!)

-

weekend erasure

we made it
to the weekend

the sink was already full
of Friday’s plates
and someone had lowered their voice
before naming a city

the kettle clicked off.
someone rinsed rice twice.

the radio kept failing
between prayer time and numbers
somebody’s aunt called from the south
and nobody said stay safe.

someone checked the window latch
as if glass had ever kept
history out.

the same hand had folded school uniforms
and counted medicine strips
by torchlight once before.

mysterious
surreal
the day folded laundry
over its own bad news.

a phone lit the table.

Tyre. Haifa. Gaza. Tehran.
names crossing the tablecloth
like spilled tea nobody cleaned at once.

not a headline exactly,
more the way a hand
stayed too long over the screen,
then reached for coriander,
salt, the chipped blue cup.

favorite poems, yes,
but also the hiss of oil,
the neighbour shaking a rug,
a child called in before dark,
the ball was left downstairs
the sandals came back dusted white
no one asked why the game ended early.
a basil plant leaning
toward whatever light
had not yet learned
to call itself fire.
and still the leaves were pinched
for dinner.

written by taking
an existing text
and erasing
individual words:

border
shelter
ceasefire
corridor
south
civilian
aid
struck
family
again
flour
signal
balcony
insulin
neighbor

some folks
have written
whole books.

some women
have only written
shopping lists:

tea
soap
lentils
batteries
bread
yeast
candles
baby syrup
bandages
charger wire
parsley
gas refill
batteries
bleach
one more packet of salt

today
write your own
from a page
you do not know
well enough
to survive inside.

maintain the whitespace
between siren and saucepan.
between the chopping board
and the breaking news banner
pluck words
from the broadcast,
from the cupboard,
from the unanswered message.

rearrange them
until the room admits
it is connected.

happy writing,
or erasing...

but leave
the weekend there,

where someone still waters
the windowsill plant
with the concentration of prayer,
while elsewhere—
no, here too—

someone is still braiding a child’s hair
someone is still soaking lentils
someone is still listening
for the second sound

evening enters houses
through what was supposed
to hold.

~ Oizys.