2025 NaPM 29 April

[RiverNotch]

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.


The last prompt involving some music, courtesy of Mozart:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2ju2...ZbNwXI2Ezd&si=JwS8oDgDGPe7MeGl
Kinda unfortunate that the dude who conducted that magnificent performance is apparently intimately tied with a certain regime...at any rate, write a poem involving a day of judgement, if not the Day of Judgement.

[dukealien]

Note with the Gift of a Necklace


Don’t judge me harshly, love, this day of wrath
when darkness clouds your mind with bitterness
and anger frames an angry red-lit path
above a gulf of lonely emptiness.

This day your choice can only be untrue
to all our former friendship and delight
we took in laughing banter; now you rue
enjoying my attentions of each night.

Perhaps you’re right, believing what you’ve heard
to break our bond of warm complicity
but think, should this true but ungracious word,
“unfaithful,” end our shared felicity?

Judge as you will, embrace or rush apart–
but new-shared guilt can be a kindling start.

[Form:  Shakespearean sonnet]

[rowens]

Nemesis

I will cancel the order,
change the dialectic,
improving faculties
while banishing the facilities.

I have become
custom to appropriations, 
strong through traditions
I energetically encounter,

voiding the locks,
sighing the outrage,
learning the old only
from the new. 

I mean both what
you think and other
things.
This instant: Not No-thing

[Mark A Becker]

That day
couldn't come soon enough.

After months, you would finally
come face to face

with the biggest challenge
of your life.

It had been a long wait
and now you'd get your chance

to see how you would handle it-
being a father.

[busker]

When the trumpets blow for Jesus
but Odin comes instead
and the Valkyries blow kisses
to those who'll soon be fed

to the grey wolves, eyes glowing red -
'tis time to pray to the gods.
The Norwegians were misled,
like the Swedes and Danes, poor sods.

Their saints and angels proved frauds,
and now it's back to basics.
So revv up all your hot rods
and strap up your Nikes, Asics,

and run towards skies more southerly
where the deities are more brotherly.

[RiverNotch]

https://www.nytimes.com/1978/02/06/archi...ative.html


Maybe he saw us as an inconvenient
harvest of weeds in place of his accustomed,
a fungal blight that called for some tough drug,
even the ragged shells of his beloved
that neither Jif nor Skippy could employ.
Better to have us bed his favored swine
or feed the furnace of his country home---
his forebears only started planting nuts
to fight against the storm of dust brought on
by their real moneymakers, greedy cotton---
and then, from cheek to cheek, his lost election
against an actual pig, a former actor
who knew his fellow hog even before
that one Saturday in '72....