Day Thirteen #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 13 Prompt

To get started with today’s prompt, first read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe. Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.

Happy writing!

Some of the lines and images in today's poem are borrowed from a work-in-progress piece about my trek in the North Eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh in September 2025. 

spring arrives in the autumn of neem

 

Ajoh, my young Arunachali guide, proclaims,

“The forest will remember your footsteps,”

and places both her palms on dewy drops

cupped in moss

mossmossmosssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss, everywhere

you behold

wave upon verdant wave

like a song on loop

hugging limbs, groins, armpits

thick girths, swinging canopies

of the rainforest trees—

too tall, too ancient, too majestic

to hold

in a single shot,

in a single lifetime

 

“We call them ancestors

and stop in prayer, whenever, wherever,” she says.

 

I follow her lead and sink my palms in the green,

greengreengreengreengreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen moss

drunk on dew, the moss springs up its spongy arms

and I’m held first, then

slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwly I sink

in pre-historic mystery, maybe even God—

my feebles, foibles, falsehoods absorbed 

in between the in-between

 

Afterwards, Ajoh and I will hug

at the edge of the forest

knee deep in muck, mud

and rest our bamboo sticks

against the breasts of this slice of this Himalayan ridge

 

If this were my end

I’d end

in peace

 

Alas!

Pray, pay heed

 

Not long after,

a stupid war will flourish

across the middle of our geography—

to finetune

our sonic sensibilities

we will know how to tell them apart:

missile from thunder,

thunder from drone,

drone from hoover, and

hoover from arrested heartbeat

 

While the doves, the bulbuls, the sparrows and the mynahs

in the patch of green that covers

the continent between our front door and garden wall

will flock in shock, all at once at am of thirty past three

and our tree of neem will beseech

its fleece of golden leaves

to not let go

just yet,

to not tremble like bells

in temples, churches, schools

From my window I will watch

our neem raise her arms to the heavens

in prayer

 

What religion, pray tell, is neem?

Arunachal

Ajoh 

Day Twelve #Na/GloPoWriMo

 Day 12 Prompt: 

 Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Happy writing!

As soon as I saw the title of Amarjit Chandan's poem, I knew I could only write about my uncle, Chacha. This is a straightforward pouring. Thank you for reading.

  

Khem Chacha 

 

My first memory of Chacha is sweet and fluffy

like freshly bought pineapple pastry,

One for Seema.

One for me.

 

We were five and four and Chacha, twenty.

In his Chacha voice—as clear as a math subtraction

2 – 2 = 0

he said, I could afford only two.

Eat them in your room.

 

There was a power cut that night. No one in our joint-family

noticed our creamy moustaches

as we sat down for dinner,

on my grandmother’s kitchen floor.

 

Chacha loved us like his own.

Even after he graduated college,

got married and was blessed

with two daughters 

of his own.

 

Home, after our mother died

was Chacha’s corner shop.

Hardboiled candies and 2- minute Maggi

noodles--sustenance enough to manoeuvre

our step mother.

 

In November 2024,

Chacha said on a  Zoom call—

Now that I’ve seen you,

I’ll live a hundred years.

 

I woke up the next day,

with a strange taste of

my cousin’s WhatsApp words

that would reach me later.

 

I knew before

my phone pinged.

 

Soon after the zoom call, 

he asked the priest to place him on the floor.

My cousin’s words stayed sprinkled

like icing sugar

undisturbed

on a slice of cake, one saves for later,

for many days.

 

Notes:

When death is imminent, Hindus place the person on a clean mat on the floor as it is believed that it helps the spirit to reconnect with the earth's energy for a smooth transition to the next life.  

Day Eleven #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 11 Prompt:

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

This was a fun prompt. My first erasure poetry. I wish I had the time to upload images of the photocopied page. It's a mess. 

I asked the husband to pick a page from Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. I bought a copy of the novel  a few years ago, but haven't managed to read it yet. So, the text on the page was new. 

From page 390 of The Luminaries

 

My shade summoned to a shilling séance

I expect to evade, forestall time

to spy upon

a very lonely world—

unable to touch

or altar it

 

In New Zealand native tradition,

the soul, when it dies, becomes a star

 

Perhaps, I will

moleskin and serge

the prospect of panning for gold

not ready to begin

new life

 

 

Day Ten #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 10 Prompt: 

In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

Forgiveness makes a monkey out of me

 

Grief is the beehive I couldn’t remove

from the beams of the my roof.

I’ve been stung. I know exile and displacement

like my tongue knows my saliva.

So, I build a room around the hive.

The bees are free to pursue any flower they fancy.

 

Are you waiting for an apology?

Like impatient eyes expecting two blue ticks

on unread WhatsApp messages?

Try again.

Am I waiting for an apology?

Like a daughter watering the roots of a felled tree?

 

My heart still beats but my LDL is raised—

despite healthy food, yoga and sort of ideal weight.

The doctor reckons it’s hereditary.

I know it’s the upside-down pineapple cake (your favourite)

I bake everyday but it always burns, gets stuck to the pan's arteries. Maybe,

my thinned-out blood will make it easier

to forgive, to accept my silent, lethal legacy?

Thank you for stopping by and for reading my poems. This photo was taken a while back in the Seychelles. 

Day Eight #Na/GloPoWriMo

 Day 8 Prompt:

In his poem, “Poet, No Thanks,” Jean D’Amérique repeats the phrase “I wasn’t a poet” multiple times, while describing other things that he instead claims to have been. In your poem for today, use a simple phrase repeatedly, and then make statements that invert or contradict that phrase.

Last night was particularly tricky. There's a ceasefire for now. Let's hope for good sense to make a come back. 

Also, I love earrings. These ones were bought in 2017 in Bhuj, Kutchch. 

Day Seven #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 7 Prompt:

In her poem, “Front Yard Rhyme,” Cecily Parks evokes the sing-songy beats that accompany girls’ clapping games, and jump-rope and skipping rhymes. Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that emulates these songs – something to snap, clap, and jump around to.

Thank you for visiting, for reading and for your wonderful comments dear readers and fellow poets. 

Day Six #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 6 Prompt:

Our daily resource is Nobel-winning poet Louise Glück’s essay, “Against Sincerity.” Here, Glück muses on the difference between honesty and truth, and how, in poetry, words that ring true are not necessarily those that are “honest” in the sense of recounting events as they happened. After all, a poem isn’t a newspaper article. Making art means selecting, trimming, choosing, exaggerating, and even deceiving, all in service of a goal that differs from a bare recitation of facts.

And now, to put theory in our practice, here’s our optional prompt! This one takes its inspiration from Yentl van Stokkum’s poem, “It’s the Warmest Summer on Record Babe,” which blends casual, almost blasé phrasing with surreal events like getting advice from a bumblebee. In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream.