NaPM, April 9, 2020

[Quixilated]

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. 

Topic: write a poem inspired by a trip or a journey.
Form : any
Line requirements: 8 or more

Questions?

[Todd]

Stories Beneath a Dark Sky

We can only blow out the candle
and huddle beneath the empty night
because of the stories, we tell ourselves.
Tales that are so old we have to blow dust
from their clichés.

There was a girl who liked the dark.
She liked men with dark looks
and darker appetites. Older
men, possessing the secrets
of the world. Men her mother hated.

Her mother didn't just hate them for their age.
She was more grounded than her daughter, rooted
to her place in life. The girl might have listened,
but this is a story about foolish choices.

The girl fell down a hole—no other way
to describe it. She snuck away
for a candlelit dinner, and predictably
only ate half her food.

Some men still feel entitled.
You get a woman dinner
or even a pomegranate, and she owes
you half her life. It's a constant
like the seasons, summer to winter.

Again, this story is about foolish choices,
except it isn't. It's about the hole
we all fall down. It's about the candle
once blown that cannot be relit.

It's about winter to summer, but also
the spring in-between,
which belongs to someone else.
It is the story we tell ourselves
to imagine we have a choice.

[dukealien]

Modes


Flying on shiny wings, faring by sea,
rolling on rubber - what can you see?
Winging, you’re high away, distantly cold;
seaborne, deep mystery, monstrous and old.
Driving, roads funnel to tunnels of fear–
even for passengers curled in the rear.
Only by train can you journey in tune:
backsides of cities ease by like the moon.

[Keith]

Postcard from the backseat

Its the same 4am start as every year,
the cold hard shiver of plastic car doors
rattled down miles of motorway.
Field mist making shapes on dark horizons

Warmth finally brings a sleeping bag
and zips me in a frenzied dream
as I fall from one branch to the next
dogs circle on the ground below.

I wake in Somerset,
blinded by rapeseed in blaze of yellow.
There are few sights more wonderful,
than a field of flowers to remind me
I have escaped the pastels of concrete.

I crack the window and join the dog
as we sniff the ocean together,
its scent rides the coast road
all the way to the welcome sign.
and apparently we've made it in good time.

Whoever you are I wish you were here
to watch the trawlers take their colours
and wash them with the tide at first light.
Today I sat among the nesting gulls
a warm breeze folding back my feathers
I made my bed in heather, lay back
under a big sky and felt the faint tremor
of waves pounding on the rocks below.

Well I'm sorry but I've got to go
so please tell someone I said hello.