2025 NaPM 14 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.


Write a poem involving a strongman, whether a mustachioed man who lifts immense weights or a well-shaven man who starts needless wars.

---

((another early entry))

Not a horse nor even a mule
but a mere donkey was the choice
of the all-sovereign Lord of Hosts
for His triumphal entry to
His city and atoning tomb,

yet drunken cutthroats celebrate
themselves as kings, insolvent moguls
emperors, and overextended
spymasters even subtle gods:

just as a hard rain promptly falls
upon this humble insular
intersection between the poles
after some record-breaking heat,
so will vengeance fall from His seat.

[Mark A Becker]

Man of Steel

He was the steely one in charge,
leading his rag-tag crew. We
thought that we could fool him,
yet he somehow always knew
what we were getting into.

So many of us, it must have been
hard to keep track; I'm amazed
when I look back. The neighborhood
kids thought that he was truly
mad, yet I still fondly remember

the man that we called Dad.

[dukealien]

Big Man


Soldier
politician
rode land into world war
twice, and proudly ruined Britain:
Churchill.

[Form:  American cinquain]

Having recently read Pat Buchanan's "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War" - he makes a distressingly good case.  Alternate title (of the poem):  "Man of the Twentieth Century."

[busker]

If you don’t have one, you aren’t one 

There’s a club of strongmen who wore moustaches:
Alaric, Genghis, and various other chiefs -
strongmen or warlord, whatever catches
the fancy of the labeller - various Sheikhs

of the Arab world or Afghan. The Taliban hatches
even now a plot to restore the primacy 
of hirsute men, not clean shaven biatches 
like the Greeks and Romans. Lionel Messi

and Maradona shunned facial hair,
as did Tarantino’s Jew they called the Bear,
but football isn’t politics except in El Salvador.
Cortez the conquistador 

wore a beard and moustache like a king,
and so was mistaken for Quetzalcoatl,
and therefore Philip, not a Scion of the Ming
dynasty got rich from Aztec gold.

Strongmen must wear moustaches like Hitler.
Kamala doesn’t have one. Let’s belittle her.

Having recently read Pat Buchanan's "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War" - he makes a distressingly good case.  Alternate title (of the poem):  "Man of the Twentieth Century."

Buchanan also had an opinion on Darwin: https://www.sj-r.com/story/opinion/colum...942734007/
Such as:
 
Darwin’s examples of natural selection — such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive — have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?
For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin.

The idiocy of "For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin" is staggering. By 2009, the human genome had been pieced together. The DNA evidence for evolution already swamped all the fossil evidence that had been validating Darwin for 150 years. Except to cretins and cynical political exploiter of those cretins.

Buchanan is an unremarkable English graduate turned hack journalist who poses as an expert on everything from the Holocaust to WW2 to evolution.
It'd be more productive to hear Tucker Carlson talk about quantum mechanics. But then again, America presents a curious dichotomy of brilliance and idiocy.