2024 NaPM 10 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 a heroic woman.

BONUS, in honour of an old favourite: it must involve a fairy tale.

[TranquillityBase]

She was worn into a hag
raising up an enemy of Man
whose feud with Hrothgar
brought the mindless killer Beowulf
into her last watery refuge
where she fought a final battle
to revenge against his bloody hands
the extinction of her clan.

The Anglo-Saxon poets
refused to give her a name.
She was the matrix of the mere
that all men feared,
where woe stalked the two-legged,
the invaders whose hall
blared out the song of patriarchy.

So I mourn Grendel’s mother
whether she was the last of Cain,
or something greater 
than we latter day monsters
can understand.

[dukealien]

Mary’s Daughter


She smiles, the final heroine
composed, complete, Edwardian,
who, flown, returns as champion
of not escaping consequence:
of Time.

No fairy Tinkerbell, no wife
of savages or ever-lost
never-maturing boys she rocks
the cradle, not
the band.

So when first star and morning pass
above and not behind she blesses
worthy men, not fay or trendy:
lover of true heroes, Wendy
Darling.

[Mark A Becker]

Though her body was smaller
than some of the village children
her voice was as big as the canyon
where kids would gather round
to her tales of wonder.

By the glow of a full moon
and the warmth of a fire
she would transfix them
with tales of deer with wings
or fish that walked on land

Long after she had passed on
those children now grown
would recount her tales
embroidering the old stories
with those of their own.

It is said that the original tale
is over two hundred years old
yet no one alive today knows
for sure when the stories started
or how far they go back.

Legend has it that a little woman
has been seen by fishermen walking
along the riverbank, with gills
instead of a mouth. Hunters spot her
with large antlers flying over the forest.

Still others claim that she had come
in a dream to warn of a massive black funnel
cloud that would destroy everything in its path.
Over 100 years all of the villgers managed
to escape before that terrible tornado struck.

[RiverNotch]

Esther


Holy men and those who would seek
to wipe out an entire people
are entitled to the same

judgement: the gallows.
Haman, of course, was not one of that illustrious
race, the Aryans: he had no love

for the Jews, no kinship with the grandson
of the Lord's Anointed,
Cyrus the Great. He was a Macedonian,

an upstart from the West,
full of envy at the comeliness
of Mardochaeus' ward,

though what he saw the day the King of Kings
began to see the fairer sex
as more than just the fairer sex

was really a community affair.
Sure, Queen Vashti would have stripped
before the whole host of Media

just to have skin like hers, but an uncle had done her hair,
a cousin had picked her songs (Hurrian House mixes
of Elamite girl groups), while a whole team of neighbours

not only sewed all her dresses
but also constructed the cedarwood closet
in which they were kept. And, in the morning,

when Artaxerxes had come to know
the pleasure of chastisement,
his Palestinian counsellor would admit
that, too, was a gift.

[Wjames]

It's easy to walk in dense brush
when someone ahead
has pressed the long grass flat.

When I was ten or eleven
my sisters were thirteen or fifteen.

The trenches were already dug
and gangrene was spreading
when I arrived at the Somme.