2023 NaPM 10 April

[RiverNotch]

Indeed, the prompts for the October NaPM 2017 seem to have been inspired by the home country of its host, just mercedes, which makes the 10 April prompt for 2013 rather appropriate.

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 your hometown/state/country
Form: any
Line requirements: 10 lines or more.

And let's not leave out milo's last words in the post:

Don't give up guys, I see some stalwarts dropping, you can do this!!

[Mark A Becker]

Route 9 from Harper’s Ferry

On an April eve like this
the road is made for driving,
when a Shenandoah moon
shines low on the horizon.

A “welcome home” aroma
greets me at a country fair;
funnel cakes, cotton candy,
honeysuckle sweetened air.

While crickets chirp and chitter
on discordant singing saws,
old bull frogs belch and bellow
deep mud puddle mating calls.

Threads of silky mist are spun
like fine webs upon the fields;
the spindly, silent spider
lightning crawls across the clouds.

On a country road like this
evening's made for driving,
as flowers fill the distance
between leaving and arriving.

[dukealien]

Place in Names


Ah, the rhymes we could have made
about your name, Losantiville!
A town around a river mouth,
a wooden fort upon your hills,
a soggy patch called Turkey Bottom.

Later, drawing hogs from Indiana
to their end, Porkopolis,
but you were always classical
with seven hills, the she-wolf and
a matching name, my Cincinnati.

[CRNDLSM]

Easter Sunday.  
We always visit my mom in the morning,
She has a big lunch prepared
For any number of friends and family
To show up during the day.
Cousins galore, this year we set up karaoke.
The quietest shyest person
Just sang 'let it go' in French, amazing.
Everyone is loud and laughing.
Then we go to her parents afternoon.
I'm sitting by myself in the living room now
Because everyone stormed out
Yelling about Disney grooming children.
Might as well be thanksgiving.

[Wjames]

Looking at Lake Ontario from the bluffs
that erode a few feet each year
and are starting to claim
the street where I grew up,
I see the hint of Rochester
across the water.

At the bottom of the cliff,
after walking down truckers hill
past memories of toboggans and bicycles,
I smell the dead fish
my dog thought were worth
getting into trouble for.

There is no less glamorous beach
than one in Scarborough, strewn with rocks
on a polluted lake,
but I am not glamorous.

[RiverNotch]

The spirit of a time is the wind that survives
what it rightly perceives as a holocaust, ruthless
in its consumption of all other winds
to bring in the rainclouds for the next year.

Guilt will trouble it all its life
for crimes it did and did not do
but from which it knows that by simply surviving
it certainly gained, dying at fifty eight

of a botched surgery for a perforated ulcer
rather than being shot in the head
as an eighty-year-old degenerate artist,

although at that point it had already moved
to where it once fancied was furthest from
the inescapable backwardness of its island home.

[TranquillityBase]

I stride through an April morning
legs pulling me forward
heart suspended in a cool breeze
passing through interspersed sounds
of birdsong, a workman’s hammer, the occasional passing car
headed for the German cemetery, my goal and turnaround.
New Braunfels is my exile, an inheritance mostly regretted,
but I’d be sorry wherever I found myself,
it’s a restlessness that runs in my family, 
the same way contentment seems to run in my wife’s blood,
so I walk on, a few clouds drifting south in a clear sky,
to the quiet of a few acres of German pioneers, 
exiles themselves.  Aren’t we all, even the contented,
long past calling any place home?

[Tiger the Lion]

The Bible Belt Paradox

He looks all twelve 
of his peers in the eye

swearing to God
he was simply 
standing his ground.

He only needs one 
to turn the other cheek.