NaPoWriMo Day 28: Room within a room

Hi, I’m doing NaPoWriMo on napowrimo.net. The challenge is to write a poem a day in April.  

For Day 28, the prompt was to write about a bedroom from your past. This one is part real, part imagination.

This is the prompt for the April 28 poem:

Today’s (optional) prompt is brought to us by the Emily Dickinson Museum. First, read this brief reminiscence of Emily Dickinson, written by her niece. And here is the prompt the museum suggests:

Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s description of her aunt’s cozy room, scented with hyacinths and a crackling stove, warmly recalls the setting decades later. Describe a bedroom from your past in a series of descriptive paragraphs or a poem. It could be your childhood room, your grandmother’s room, a college dormitory or another significant space from your life.

Room within a room

A room within a room,

Without a face.

A series of faint lines

Lightly charcoal-sketched,

Shaded with criss-crosses.

Curtains close out the sun,

Dust balls floating mid-air

Between labyrinthine books.

Papers stretching fingers

Peek in cobwebbed corners.

We listen out for life:

Crisp red heat of baking bread,

Heady sweet grace of tulips,

Straight-backed figurines

Who used to dance once.

Blankets hug the bedstead.

A whale swims on a towel,

Speech lost in a dead tongue.

Terracotta turtle stares, paws

Outstretched in aboriginal art.

 

It leans against a white wall,

Saying living demands colour.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2020

NaPoWriMo Day 27: White noise

Hi, I’m doing NaPoWriMo on napowrimo.net. The challenge is to write a poem a day in April.  

For Day 27, the optional prompt was to write a poem in the form of a review, of something that isn’t normally reviewed. I failed on this, but have a go.

Today I haven’t followed the prompt. I couldn’t get to sleep until gone 4am and then I woke around 8am, so I’m pretty tired. The brain is slow and something tells me I’m going to konk out in the afternoon after a very short day! We all know the frustration of not being able to sleep. Ironically, I watched the film Insomnia last night (the Al Pacino version, although I’d like to watch the original). So, here’s a poem about the sound that kept me awake last night.

White noise

Time trickles past three-thirty

And all I want to do is sleep

This hand on my shoulder

Won’t let me go

There’s a distant hum

It isn’t an animal breathing out

But a man-made thing pulsating

All the birds have nested down

Even the sun is slumbering

The trees have twisted inside

Hugging their blankets of foliage

Restless

Is this white noise

The heartbeat of the world?

It pumps an even dull tread

Walking in and waking silence

The body reacts to every echo

Of sound, every magnetic

Impulse

Stuck in eternal night shade

We exist in limbo

Hours and hours and hours

It cuts a knife through quiet

Hear it breathe in

Exhale

This white noise fanning out

Until it absorbs everything.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 27 2020

A Poem a Day (128): Sleep’s lure

I wrote this for 2minutesgo, JD Mader’s writing blog. Write, read, post anything there over the weekend. It’s not too late to head over there and write something :) Hope you are having a very lazy, dreamy Sunday.

In sleep’s lure

In sleep’s lure

I dream in colour

Weaving corridors

Of light

Where shadows pour

Cast in a roar

Doors to nowhere

Houses without eyes

Voices on the breeze

Amid spectre trees

A diamond everglade

A closing room

I strike my place

Lay down my face

Make a pillow

For night’s walk 

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 26, 2020