NaPoWriMo 19: Archive of a room

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

For Day 19, the prompt was to write using a walking archive.

This is the prompt for the April 19 poem:

Write a poem based on a ‘walking archive’. What’s that? Well, it’s when you go on a walk and gather up interesting things – a flower, a strange piece of bark, a rock. This becomes your ‘walking archive’ – the physical instantiation of your walk. If you’re unable to get out of the house (as many of us are), you can wander around your own home and gather knick-knacks, family photos, maybe a strange spice or kitchen gadget you never use. Once you’ve finished your gathering, lay all your materials out on a tray table, like museum specimens. Now, let your group of materials inspire your poem!

Archive of a room

The big gathering

Begins with a photograph.

A bumblebee hovering

Over pale purple cactuses,

Their orange horns yearning

For his pollen-dusted fuzz.

Rose quartz, blue glass fish,

A dog walking his old lady,

Cat curled in a wooden nap.

Beneath my cup, the cowboy

Bill Silhouette rests his guitar

Against a huge yellow moon,

‘Music city dreaming’.

I reminisce of Nashville lights,

Its 24-7 rock-blues-country vibe,

Settling in at the Station Inn.

A blue and white camper van

Tells me to ‘Go your own way’

And I have, I think, come what may.

Dancing in a yellow sea of notes,

Girl in a blue dress twirls the stars

As two mice giggle, the cat on a scarf

Hung too far off to pounce.

In a tale of two cushions, the owl

Seeks an Eiffel of the Parisian scene,

But he is grounded here for life.

I wonder what adventure Mr Dahl

Would write for him?

‘Shine like the sun’ the birds tell me

When the dark has sucked out the light

And I don’t feel like facing this world.

I take a bee bomb from the closet

To venture into the sun-soaked outside

Where blackbirds sift the silence,

Unfurling their song into empty spaces.

And I am back where we started,

Imagining fuzzy bees 

When the wildflowers grow.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 19, 2020