2024 NaPM 07 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.

Write about exile.

FORM: Must not be free verse. Specify what form you used somewhere in your post. This will be important later....

[TranquillityBase]

(cinquain)

Here I
listen for a count
sit, hiring syllables
an abacus for the free tongue
weeping.

[Mark A Becker]

all those miles she walked
made a ruin of her feet -
caught, and then flown back

but she's got nobody here
last year they were disappeared



tanka

[dukealien]

Words for Home-Leaving


Say Shoah, Nakba, exile, Exodus–
brief words for losing lands once home to us:
reality or tales grown fabulous
told to inflame a child, the credulous?

Some victories leave skull-hills of defeat
while others, merely feared, panic retreat;
the driving-out of peoples, incomplete,
or total’s neither cleansing nor discrete.

Success in far-flung exile softens wrath
while living near the victors lights a path
to skulking vengeance: rage and madded math
claim eye for tooth, blood-rivers for bloodbath.

[rhymed quatrains]

[busker]

I am exiled from my home
with its rice fields and red chilli
flowers on the bush,
and clouds swirling up to a silent valley
between mountains.

[Quixilated]

I left unwillingly with empty hands
and unshod feet.  Time ran his path
while I had been walking mine. 
Foolishly, I hid my face in a basket,
but it spilled out along the way.
I am always goaded forward, onward,
never to look back, never to return.

I baked memories for the road,
wrapped carefully, for taste transcends time
and place. But the memories grew stale
and lost their flavor. I cannot go back,
not even in my mind.  The door is locked
and the path is long since swept away.

It is time to move forward again,
the clock has grown spikes,
and my grip on this moment is failing. 
I place my face in a basket and bake
memories to nibble on the way. 
Futility never wins over hope.

[RiverNotch]

(syllabic octave)

There is no middle class in this country.
Lofty thinking among the nouveau riche
is mere pretension: one has to sojourn
where all one can be is a trustworthy
slave, the one brown man in a sea of black
and white, for a sense of security.
There is no middle class in this country
and no escape except for that one class.

[Wjames]

(cinquain)

How frail
a mass of tents,
the ghosts on every curb
with empty cup in hand
are trapped.

[Tiger the Lion]

A Too Pigmented Sheep

Love me.

My wool's as warm
as any other lamb's.

Send me away if it's untrue,
Father.



*** an odd iteration of a cinquain.