#NaPoWriMo – The Final Day

April has been a busy old month with the London Marathon, Christenings and Caius was away with work for a lot of it. Through it all I have kept up with writing a poem a day (more or less, I wrote a couple late) and one or two of them are even okay!

I do feel like I have learned from the experience and I have mostly enjoyed it, but I can’t say I’m not relieved that tomorrow I won’t have to sit down and force out a poem. Instead I might just organise the ones I have written and print them all out as a booklet for myself to prove I did it. And probably for me to attack with a red pen and edit things to death.

All that is really left is to write a poem for today. Which should be easy but my brain is entirely blank and void of inspiration so it may have to wait until later when I have been for a walk or something.

Unpacking ~ A #NaPoWriMo Poem

I wrote this yesterday (25th April) after spending a lot of the day sorting through bags and boxes of stuff from when I was 16 through university and up to breaking up with the Small’s father. It was a surreal kind of day with lots of emotions floating around and both happy and sad memories brought back up. I found all sorts including a memory card from my phone with my first photos of Tori after she was born and Arthur’s name band from hospital when he was born. At the end of the day, this poem is what I came up with:

Unpacking

.

Words that I meant with every cell,

Secrets I swore I would never tell.

Photographs with sad little smiles,

Photographs with belly laughs.

Stories I wrote down years ago,

Forgot and just picked back up.

.

Scraps of paper filled with hurt,

A crumpled tiny baby shirt,

Three odd socks and a green toothbrush,

A broken pen, a lost notebook.

Stories I wrote down years ago,

Forgot and just picked back up.

.

A teddy bear layered with dust,

A few loose screws starting to rust,

Half a best-friend necklace,

A Valentines card, tear-stained;

Stories I wrote down years ago,

Forgot and just picked back up,

Brushed them down, kissed them goodbye,

Made my peace and wrote ‘The End’.

©Carole H Holland April 2013

#NaPoWriMo meets the London Marathon (An Excuse.)

I have a confession to make…

I didn’t write any poems this weekend.

I would claim that I didn’t totally forget, but that would be a total lie because I did. But I totally forgot having given myself prior permission and promising myself that I would catch up (which I have).

You see it was the London Marathon this weekend and I was down there to help out as a St John’s Marshal at the Mini Marathon and let me tell you – there is no time to sit down and write out a poem on Marathon Day. I woke up at about 4am and went to sleep at about midnight the next night and spent a good 12 of the hours inbetween on my feet. This is my excuse and I am sticking with it.

So there.

As for Saturday and Monday? I was either over excited, trying not to miss a train, meeting new people or so tired I couldn’t think in sentences, never mind write poems.

So today I have sat down and written poems for all the days I missed. I hope this doesn’t count too much as cheating.

Here is the poem I wrote for Sunday 21st April:

London Marathon 2013

Numbers, faces, feet on tarmac,

Flowing past like water.

Cheering, shouting, whistling loud,

Crowds of people wave.

.

Balloons, flags, made-at-home signs,

Shimmer in the sunshine.

Big Ben watches over proceedings

As the whole world runs by.

©Carole H Holland April 2013

#NaPoWriMo ~ The Half-way Mark

Half-way through April means it’s half-way through National Poetry Month and thus NaPoWriMo.

I have kept up, more or less. Well, I say more or less – I have written something every single day but some have been somewhat half-hearted efforts.

Take my poem from 13th April for example:

Lament

Poems are like chocolate bars -

Never there when you really need them.

~

Not exactly my finest work ever, but I was tired after a day of fever and sickness and it was about all I could manage to jot down two lines.

I have been using the prompts from NaPoWriMo.net on days where I haven’t been sure where to start and just when I wanted to try something new – they are great for discovering different forms of poetry that I hadn’t previously heard of or tried. Like yesterday’s prompt to write a poem in Persona of a character – I enjoyed trying to capture the essence of one of my favourite book characters in a poem. I was quite pleased with it up until Caius read it and thought I was trying to be artistically racist in the voice of a character – I am using the fact that he didn’t know the character and hadn’t twigged that it was about White and Black magic to stop myself from despairing too much.

I have written a couple of poems I like, though they are only first drafts due to the nature of the challenge. By the end of it I hope I will have a few poems to edit and spruce up to maybe enter into competitions along with some disasters and a couple that aren’t polished but mean something to me.

Like this one from the 12th, which I wrote with my little boy in mind.

Arthur Harry

It’s hard to imagine,

When you’re curled here on my knee,

That not so very long ago you were a tiny newborn babe.

.

It’s hard to imagine,

When you’re clinging to my arm,

That I’ll have to let you go one day.

.

It’s hard to imagine,

When I’m blowing your snotty nose,

That you’ll be a man one day, with children of your own.

.

It’s hard to imagine,

The day your voice will break,

And the day you leave to make your own home.

.

It’s hard to imagine,

So I don’t think I will,

I’ll hold you close whilst you’re still small,

.

And let the future lie.

All Poems ©Carole H Holland 04/2013

#NaPoWriMo ~ An Update

It is the 9th of April and I can sit here and say that I have so far written 9 poems.

I can also sit here and quite honestly say that a couple of them are utter rubbish.

But you know what? That’s okay. They are all first drafts and they are all unplanned and not very well thought through but they all exist. My challenge wasn’t to write 30 amazing pieces of literary art but to produce 30 poems in 30 days. Of course some are going to suck – it’s very hard to find inspiration in such quantities and some days I’m just not in a poetry mood (like today, where my ‘ottiva rima’ poem is all about me not wanting to write a poem)  BUT there are a couple I quite like and I have had a bit of fun.

I am using prompts from around the internet as well as just writing from my own inspiration and I am doing what I had hoped – discovering and experimenting with forms that I was either totally unfamiliar with or had at least never tried before.

Nine days in and I have written a pantoum, a limerick, a prose poem, an ottiva rima and a valediction alongside some free verse and a poem that only really works if you see it written down.

At the end of the month I am going to compile my poems and print them off in a booklet. Probably just for me to read and maybe a couple of members of my family if they want. I’ll even put in the rubbish poems because they’re amusingly bad.

Hopefully I will come out of April knowing a bit more about poetry and having maybe discovered what sort of poetry is my ‘thing’.

I will end on my poem from the 5th April. It falls into my category of ‘not so good’ but was quite amusing to write. The title is actually taken from Iain M. Banks’s 2012 novel The Hydrogen Sonata - it is the name of a spaceship.

A Fine Disregard For Awkward Facts

That extra wide parking bay beside the door?

Yeah, you need a badge for that.

Unless, of course, you’re pushed for time,

or have a ginger cat.

You are excused if you’re wearing a suit,

but only with matching hat.

No badge? No problem if your car is expensive;

They let you off for that.

We’ll leave the disabled bay for those in need,

and for lazy scum like you.

Carole H Holland, 05/04/2013

NaPoWriMo

It only seems five minutes since I was doing NaNoWriMo and yet here we are with April fast approaching and a new challenge before us.

I say us, I mean me.

For some people April means CampNaNoWriMo, where you set your own word count and spend the month trying to hit it – like NaNoWriMo but a bit more flexible but not for me, this time.

This year I have signed up for a different project encouraged by Carrie Etter, my Personal Tutor from university, who I am happily still in regular contact with – the project? NaPoWriMo: National Poetry Writing Month.

The task for the month – to write a poem a day. They could be unrelated, a series on a topic, or sections of one big epic poem – whatever you fancy. Just one poem a day, no wordcount.

I don’t feel like I could commit to a wordcount like NaNoWriMo again at the moment, not to mention the fact that I am still finishing off my NaNo project ‘Faerie Or No‘ and I don’t want to start something else and abandon that one – I want to finish that, not add it to my pile of things I never completed.

With that in mind, NaPoWriMo appealed because poems can be any length – on days I have less time and energy I could write a short poem and on days I have more (such as Tuesdays when the Smalls are at their father’s) I could challenge myself to write something longer or more challenging. I want to experiment with different forms over the month – try some new things, revisit old favourites, try and find some love for ones I previously dismissed (prose poetry, I still don’t get it {Sorry, Carrie!} – maybe this challenge will help change that).

I won’t be publishing every poem on my blog – that would be both boring for everyone and would mean that should I randomly ever decide that poetry is my thing then I couldn’t publish them as ‘new’ later because they’d have been technically already published. I will put some up though, to prove I am actually doing something!

So April – 30 days, 30 poems.

Wish me luck and anyone else who fancies giving it a try – just drop Carrie a note on her blog or on Twitter (links above) and she’ll add you to the list and we can all cheer each other along.

Lost, Found and Lost Again ~ A Poem

There’s a whisper on the stairs,

of a secret dark and dim.

There’s a stillness in the shadows,

filled with fear and hurt.

.

No-one saw what happened here,

no-one really cares.

Just a dirty child found

cold and nameless, lost.

.

Allocate a bedspace,

note down a statistic.

Add it to the system,

turn your back and leave.

.

What’s another life,

in the grand scale of things?

What starts in the shadows

can stay there, hidden.

.

Forever in the half-light,

never seen as ‘real’.

Just another number -

Another child the world forgot.

CHH 12/03/13

365 Project, Week 38 ~ ‘Outside’

What a perfect week for ‘outside’ to be my theme!

MONDAY:

Outside the car it is snowy,

Drifting, sliding, flowing.

Arctic winds are all blowy,

Bitter, chill and snowy.

TUESDAY:

Beautiful but slippy,

Snow compressed to ice.

Unexpected slips are scary,

But controlled sliding is nice.

WEDNESDAY:

Delicate crystals layered deep,

Nature in silent slumber keep,

But even on the coldest days,

Life shines through in many ways.

THURSDAY:

Finally sunshine warms our faces,

sparkling in snowdrifts,

warming dark places,

breaking Winter’s gloom.

FRIDAY:

Soft and swirling,

gently curling,

finally thawing,

warming, waking.

SATURDAY:

Midnight quiet, snow steady,

Ever falling,  coating the ground,

making it clean, making it ready,

for snowmen and sledging and snowballs all round.

SUNDAY:

Familiar places, out of sight,

under water, flooded, gone.

Swirling eddies catch the light,

beauty hiding natural destruction.

*

Remembering the Beginning

It’s been nearly a year

since I closed my eyes

and listened to my heart.

It was bruised and battered,

a little shy and afraid of

getting hurt even more.

But it needed to feel again,

needed some excitement,

some freedom without guilt.

 

It needed you.

It needed you to ask

if I wanted to face

a cold December day

in a half-familiar city

drinking hot chocolate

with a friend-of-a-friend

whose smile made me melt.

 

 

To explore a market

full of Christmas cheer

that so far had been slighted

by a soul full of fear.

It took a bit of Glühwein

and some swallowing of pride,

to fall step by step beside you

and take hold of your hand.

 

 

I was still afraid but it was different -

It wasn’t fear that froze my heart.

It was fear that made me giggle

and open my mind.

I remembered who I was.

 

Sometimes it takes a nervous,

shy and tentative kiss

to break the chains of guilt.

I realised, suddenly,

what I needed -

what I wanted -

was this:

 

Spending time with someone

who made me laugh and forget

to be shy or embarrassed.

Someone who didn’t want me

to be an ideal something.

They didn’t expect anything in particular.

They just wanted me to be me.

 

I remembered who ‘me’ was.

It might not have been forever,

it could have ended there and then,

but it broke the hold of fear

and reminded me how to be brave.

I needed to be me,

for me and for Them.

I needed to be stronger and I needed to laugh.

A life without laughter is no life at all.

 

I remembered.

I remember.

It lasted.

We stayed.

We laugh.

We love.

We live.

 

Always.

05/12/2012

CHH

Poetry

It was MD Writer’s Club last night and in a change from our usual programme we had a guest speaker in. Brenda Read-Brown is a writer, primarily a performance poet and it was brilliant to listen to her – I forget how much I love watching performance poets because they challenge me to think often at the same time as making me cry laughing.

After listening to some of her work she lead us through a brilliant little workshop that ended in us having to write a poem, choosing from on of three prompts/themes:

1) A poem about somebody you know using a list of items/objects as the base.
2) A character poem beginning with the line ‘It’s always, always the same…’
3) A Magic box poem. (The box being filled with things that you love – pull one out, write it)

Liberty and I both chose to do option 1 and Lib’s effort was amazing (read it here) especially because she can’t stand writing poetry most of the time.

Here is my effort:

Arthur

Sticky fingerprints that
smell faintly of berries
on the wall beside the door.
A bottle, half empty,
abandoned in a pool on the floor.

A small green train,
well loved, paint chipped,
stands at a station of dismantled
Duplo castles.

A teddy bear with his bow untied
sits solemnly guarding a
picnic of pencil crayons on
placemats of paper.

Half a scribble on the door,
interrupted.
Books untidy in a puddle
beside the bookshelf.

Red tractor, blue elephant,
half a jigsaw puzzle
carefully placed, one at a time
but all in a muddle.

A sock, just one,
Lost halfway beneath the cot.
Waiting to be reunited,
a false hope. Wishful thinking.