NaPoWriMo is Coming! NaPoWriMo is Coming!

Hey folks – April is upon us so here comes National Poetry Writing Month. Yup – that yearly challenge of writing 30 poems in 30 days. You know you want to. You can write them all on your own and tell no one. There are lots of places that you can find daily prompts. One of them is the founder of the feast, NaPoWriMo where you can also find other poets, reporting in with their responses, as well as a list of their websites and a jolly month-long party!

If you really want to get into the right festive mood, you can take up the challenge of spreading googly-eyes everywhere you can! Use up all your googly eyes, especially the self-stick ones!

And then obligatory cat photos. Or maybe you want to consider a month of cat sonnets or haiku. I find it useful to go in with some ideas and maybe a plan as to form.

NaPoWriMo is Coming! NaPoWriMo is Coming!

Day 16 NaPoWriMo 2022

The NaPoWriMo prompt suggested we “write a curtal sonnet. This is a variation on the classic 14-line sonnet. The curtal sonnet form was developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he used it for what is probably his most famous poem, “Pied Beauty.” A curtal sonnet has eleven lines, instead of the usual fourteen, and the last line is shorter than the ten that precede it.”

Now, I have written quite a number of sonnets, but lately it’s haiku that captures the day for me. Sometimes I’ll take some scrap of stalled poem and squeeze out what it’s about into haiku because it leaves out all the fluff and nonsense.

Having said all that, tomorrow is National Haiku Day, April seventeenth of course, and I was already thinking about how to spend tomorrow doing extra haiku in amongst all the other stuff that’s come together on a Sunday in April. I had already started some haiku on the topic of haiku day when I read the prompt and wondered if that could work. So here it is, my apologies to Gerard Manley Hopkins and anyone else.

April seventeenth, two thousand and twenty-two
Easter, Pesach, Ramadan and it’s haiku day!
yearly haiku day, just seventeen syllables
seventeen is all, perhaps hard to start
but once you’ve written the first, they get easier
soon everything comes unfurling in seventeens.

Five seven and five. less traditional?
an American sentence modern seventeen
whatever you see or hear or do, Haiku Day,
distilling the world, capturing just the essence
open your ears – write!

and finally an example of why you don’t weed gardens until plants are recognizable. First spread of the several years old patch of virginia bluebells

Day 16 NaPoWriMo 2022

Day 4 NaPoWriMo

A different kind of Monday – waited for a package – yeah! which came – yeah! and the new pen was beautiful – yeah! and the new ink was good – yeah! but the nib size was wrong and I didn’t realize it right was wrong – boo!

On the other hand, it was an interesting experience to try the BIGGEST nib this company makes when I was expecting an Extra Fine nib and the company I bought it from was fabulous when I chatted them up about it. So it’s on its way back and hopefully soon I’ll have the right size one.

Didn’t do much else today really except go to the post office to start the pen’s return trip. Why then am I so hungry and why did I think of this poem when I started to think about writing a day four poem? I don’t know but once I’d started down that road there was no turning back. (The NaPoWriMo prompt was “Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem . . . in the form of a poetry prompt.”

It’s not often I can dip my toe into a prompt so here it is:

this is just to say

your poetic prompt:
to explore a
rash of crimes
in your locality

and if any
should involve
a theft of fruits
left to chill

offer some
forgiveness
and empathy —
they were so sweet

Day 4 NaPoWriMo

Happy Birthday to Me!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Signatures

https://static01.nyt.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000005831633I love to sign my name. I’m in awe of how popular authors manage to sign many thousands of books. Surely you practiced signing your name at some point in your life. I did!

In other news…

It’s not often I get to experience something for the first time and something that no one I know has reported… but this week… yup, that’s me!

I was patting myself on the back recently for remembering to restock the old toilet paper after putting the last roll in the bathroom. Pat. Pat. Pat. Well done woman, well done!

Time passes and the day comes to break into the new package and put the next roll on. Something seemed weird from the beginning but it took me a few days to figure it out. And I’ve been laughing ever since because…

This roll of my normal plain ol’ Scot 1000 HAS NO FREAKIN’ PERFORATIONS!

You may begin to laugh now… maybe there’s a poem in there somewhere.

Day Thirteen, NaPoWriMo

I don’t remember if the accompanying gold had a specific name but that green darkened many a kitchen cabinet and appliance in its day…

Long ago, in a childhood
far away in upstate New York
kitchens used to be
avocado,
A color foreign,
dark olive green, not
quite army or khaki
sometimes paired with gold.
But avocado was something
unknown, a mysterious myth
of something which
might be real. Somewhere else.
As a fashion decorating goal
it ceded to red or blue or white
and now, I think, concrete
but what that name,
that dark color meant here,
so close to New England
was not revealed for many years
when a bowl of green appeared
next to chips and that
new thing, salsa
as wonderfully exotic as
the dance of the same name.
Now, feeling time-traveled
like readers arriving
finally at the red planet
we embrace the avocado,
not just for chips
it’s snuck into sandwiches
and now, for breakfast
welcome on our toast.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here we are in veggie central, but first a look at veggies past:

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. — Fred Rogers a.k.a. Mister Rogers

Or you decide, what the heck, one more vegetable and yes, please, pass the potatoes back here.

Thursday in New Zealand

I have zipped my suitcase shut. Thus endeth my labors for this morning. 

This guy did not help me, lol.

Saturday, Landing In Wanaka But Beginning…

I have a few days of photos to upload and commentary t’boot but today… today folks, the day started with

Cheezehenge: