2024 NaPM 21 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.

Mourn.

[Mark A Becker]

Morning

From darkness, something unseen-
in dead silence it screams.

As day breaks we're caught in between
sleepless shadows and dreams.

(you reach for me underneath sheets)

We feel a hurt that runs deep-
hold tight, try to fall back asleep.

[TranquillityBase]

The tears don’t come
so unexpectedly now
only memories materialize
from the void where you once dwelt:
riding in the truck, you driving,
me with Buster in my lap,
on our way to cut cedar.
Buster’s anus made an imprint
on my denim sleeve
I displayed it for you,
named it the Asshole of Turin,
we laughed together,
the longest laugh I ever inspired in you.

That was just months 
before fentanyl transformed you
into a statue, laid on a gurney.
Covid times, we were not allowed
a goodbye kiss, I remember just
that your lips were dried and cracked,
couldn’t look for long and not embrace you,
so crumbled into a heaving mass of sobs,
crying out a hundred senseless threats.

Those images are buried now,
exhumed to display the violence
of mourning’s birth.  As for me,
I’m back in the truck
with my son again, 
laughing.

[Wjames]

Your memory walks the graveyard
smelling daffodils after rain,
laying in summer grass
with a good book.

In the winter, it's too cold to be still
so it shakes with the roots of the oak
beside your stone.

I often picture yesterdays
tomorrow today.

[dukealien]

Mourn with Me


Now bow Your head and mourn with me again
this day their tragic loss of innocence
their anthem sung in halting minor key...
each time believing they would be allowed
to live together with, yet stay apart–
who cannot both assimilate and be.

They felt, again, while trying to comply,
that being useful would earn tolerance.
But as in every instance heretofore
when lender turned to hated creditor
indulgence twisted into Inquisition
and Pale of Settlement to blood pogrom.

Each time their fatal innocence re-grows
and buds and flowers on a harrowed vine
to once again be lopped and cauterized.
Dear God in Heaven, mourn along with me
and show Your people mercy now, at last,
whose anthem and whose curse is called “The Hope.”

[busker]

1713627242[/url]']
Those images are buried now,
exhumed to display the violence
of mourning’s birth.  As for me,
I’m back in the truck
with my son again, 
laughing.

this is a very powerful line. intense.

---

Mourn

You fade, like a flower,
hour by hour.
Day by day
you fall away 
little by little,
like your memories of
a harvest moon
in Catalhoyuk.

---

[RiverNotch]

Imagination and memory
can be dangerous. We are taught to keep our hearts and minds
completely silent, when we pray,
because our God is above all,
even imagination. We are taught to keep our eyes
open, fixed at best on His Image
found in icons portraying Him, His mother, His saints,
His venerable cross, or else
on some blank space.

Still, though I strive to have my every action
be some kind of prayer, right now I wonder
how He must have felt, in those four days
He was still on His way to Bethany: Lazarus on that bed,
struggling to breathe, until Mary and Martha
(the former by his side, the latter handling his affairs
in the other room) heard that dreadful gurgle
and rendered themselves unclean in stripping him,
in washing his body with water
and anointing it with myrrh
then wrapping it in linen -- the strongest men of the village
carrying his corpse into the tomb
while those with the clearest voices chanted
all one-fifty of the Psalms
with as much dispassion
as their mourning hearts could muster
(this was, after all, a time
when everyone knew everyone) -- decomposition retarded,
but not fully stopped, by the heat
so that when He finally arrived
the cheeks and abdomen
were ever so slightly distended, the fingertips and toes
were faintly tinged bile green.

It is already established
that He wept when He arrived,
but whether there was much weeping He had to suppress
on His return to Judea
or whether He advised His beloved disciple
to leave out all such details
(and for what reason, then?
What had He meant to show
or teach, by such silence?) is left
to the imagination.