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Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.
This year, there are no form requirements, only "tiers" or "rankings" given informally to all participants:
Bronze Tier: Participate at least once.
Silver Tier: Participate all days.
Gold Tier: Participate all days, and have all entries be the same form or have all entries be different forms.
One of my sources for these prompts is kinda superstitious. They'd rather today's prompt remain unnamed, but then what could it be?
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High Noon
Upon a clear day, darkness
descends. Silence falls
deeply, under a crimson sky.
Birds have flown, seeking
shelter. A lone centurion
comes to the sudden
realization that something
has gone terribly wrong
with This One.
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Mahomet said: “kill the jet black dog”,
and that’s how we know he wasn’t one sent from god
but a false prophet.
But Jesus cursed a fig tree for not bearing fruit
out of season. You can’t make sense of it
and so the beatitudes are moot.
Great Moloch had his Tophet -
a lie his enemies spread against the Canaanite,
justifying Abrahamic wrong and right.
O, give me the wraiths,
the banshees, spirits of the dead
and gods in groves and wells.
On pretentious diets we have fed,
mishmashes of superstition and Greek philosophy
or Sufi nonsense and worse Salafi
seriousness. Or the false doctrine of karma.
Enough of tasting this and that dharma.
Give me a religion that’s simple and light,
something involving a blood sacrifice...
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Joined: Nov 2013
04-19-2025, 12:48 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-19-2025, 12:51 AM by RiverNotch.)
Kapampangan women come
bearing some dinuguan---
my dead aunts, somehow still waiting,
shrunk to morning shadows fading---
while the men their crosses bear
and we children stop and stare.
Here are doctors watching for
signs of heat stroke in the poor;
there, less needful sacerdotes
calling for some capirotes,
who can argue that the men
do not do this all in vain,
spilling blood before such tourists
as soon wonder: "Where's the sisig?"
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Joined: Jun 2015
You have some interesting rhymes working here, notch
:
come / dinuguan
sacerdotes / capirotes
tourists / sisig
This poem made me look up a couple words, and that is fine with me- I like the flavor of the language.
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Untitled
Nada the Eternal Nameless
holds us anything but blameless
dares us to live another charmless day
or end it now like Ernest Hemingway
[Form: Clerihew]
Non-practicing atheist
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Joined: Sep 2014
The Current Card is Death. Which I Posted under the Prompt of an ugly subject.
So here, when I get back from town, I'll post as a Pretty Subject.
