NaPoWriMo Day 11: Butterflies drift

Day 11 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt:
And last but not least, today’s (optional) prompt. Take a look at Kyle Dargan’s Diaspora: A Narcolepsy Hymn. This poem is a loose villanelle that uses song lyrics as its repeating lines (loose because it doesn’t rhyme). Your challenge is, like Dargan, to write a poem that incorporates song lyrics – ideally, incorporating them as opposing phrases or refrains.
 

 
Butterflies drift
after David Bowie

Now she walks through her sunken dream,
speckled monarchs swirl, cherry blossoms rain and night is gone.
Wonder if he’ll ever know?
 
None of the elements would gel so that cold reality had to go.
It pierced the heart with daggers thrown under the longing luna.
Now she walks through her sunken dream.
 
Lyrics compose without your input when you’re not listening.
Pictures paint themselves; fog shapes labyrinths for the directionless.
Wonder if he’ll ever know?
 
Leaves of stories weave characters who cannot find the words.
Tourmaline builds a shield to protect the wounded light.
Now she walks through her sunken dream.
 
We are who we are, and we cannot be anyone else.
You cannot change the way you breathe in this changing air.
Wonder if he’ll ever know?
 
The widest ocean isn’t far when the pull of the tide is so fierce.
It’s like bread or oxygen. Conjures existence’s ebb and flow.
Wonder if he’ll ever know
that she walks through her sunken dream.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 11, 2025

Lyrics from David Bowie’s Life on Mars: Now she walks through her sunken dream / Wonder if he’ll ever know 

NaPoWriMo Day 10: Spirited away

Day 10 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt:
Yesterday, we looked at a poem that used sound in a very particular way to create a slow and mysterious feeling. Mark Bibbins’ poem, At the End of the Endless Decade, uses sound very differently, with less eerieness and more wordplay. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that uses alliteration and punning.

 
Spirited away
 
A small medium at large,
she was not so small as to be miniscule,
invisible, naked to the inquisitive eye,
but the ‘perfect’ people just didn’t notice her.
 
At social gatherings, she’d gaze into the punch bowl,
poised with ladle, trying to scry a meaning
in the bubbling liquid brew – cue three witches
who’d mistake her for a silent statue
and scoop it up out of her paws.
She’d be too goddammed gobsmacked
to argue while they chitter-chattered,
helped themselves to a dastardly double
and scooted off. The cheek of it.
 
She was always the last to board a bus,
too polite to point out that she was first in line.
In her mind, it didn’t go that way: it was handbags
at dawn and a beastly battle to the bitter end.
 
Even a spaniel mistook her for a lamppost once.
So soft and quiet, you might mistake her for a bush.
Her hair was evidently quite bush-like.
The odd sparrow would seek to nest in it,
get disappointed at its gormless attempt
at a classy home build.
Not up to the proper pecking order.
 
One day she bought her very first crystal ball,
fashioned from a big slab of black tourmaline.
Staring into its sacred core, the seconds swirled
until her eager eyes glazed over.
 
There’s nothing to see, she thought,
until her mother turned up and asked why
she hadn’t washed her hair for three days straight
and why twigs stuck out at awkward angles
where that bloody bird had tried to nest.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 10, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 9: Leaving

 
Day 9 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt:
Like music, poetry offers us a way to play with and experience sound. This can be through meter, rhyme, varying line lengths, assonance, alliteration, and other techniques that call attention not just to the meaning of words, but the way they echo and resonate against each other. For a look at some of these sound devices in action, read Robert Hillyer’s poem, Fog. It uses rhyme and uneven line lengths to create a slow, off-kilter rhythm that heightens the poem’s overall ominousness. Today we’d like to challenge you to try writing a poem that uses rhyme, but without adhering to specific line lengths. For extra credit, reference a very specific sound, like the buoy in Hillyer’s poem.

 
 
Leaving
 
Leaves blow wild, verdant green,
sunshine yellow, burnt-out orange, in flame,
cascade and roll to sail serene,
then flip and dive, so hard to tame,
shuffled in the hands of the wind.
All-seeing, it will not try to blind or bind
their spirited adventure,
or the savage times they must endure.
Racing to beat me to the treeline,
they shake all that’s mine.
 
I am on my knees,
summoned by the playful fae,
and here I am what no one sees
beyond the greenness of my youth,
seeking the world’s own truth.
Hold nothing at bay
in this desire to grow wiser.
Time is the miser.
 
I fall upon the whims of the west wind, untested,
and trust it to carry me,
my true self so weightless, suspended,
to places I cannot yet see.
We’ll scale mountains, marvel, levitate,
surf seawaters, circumnavigate,
 
only to return when we tire of it all,
but we’ll never make that curtain call,
just keep on, keep on evolving,
iridescent in our ever-changing colouring,
 
a sacred switch to cue each season’s bliss,
never being anything less than this.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 9, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 8: Ghazal on scarlet

Hi, I decided to do the NaPoWriMo Challenge, where you write a poem a day from prompts, but I've missed 7 days already! So, here I am on day 8, being challenged to write a love ghazal. So here goes. If you wanna join in, here's the website: www.napowrimo.net. It's an awesome site, full of poetry and prompts. You can read everyone's poems over the month too. 

Prompt: 

The ghazal (pronounced kind of like “huzzle,” with a particularly husky “h” at the beginning) is a form that originates in Arabic poetry, and is often used for love poems. Ghazals commonly consist of five to fifteen couplets that are independent from each other but are nonetheless linked abstractly in their theme; and more concretely by their form. And what is that form? In English ghazals, the usual constraints are that:
-- the lines all have to be of around the same length (though formal meter/syllable-counts are not employed); and
-- both lines of the first couplet end on the same word or words, which then form a refrain that is echoed at the end of each succeeding couplet.

Now try writing your own ghazal that takes the form of a love song – however you want to define that. Observe the conventions of the repeated word, including your own name (or a reference to yourself) and having the stanzas present independent thoughts along a single theme – a meditation, not a story.

Ghazal on scarlet
 
It’s a meditation on a distanced time and place,
a conversation in a crowd, a sometime place.
 
A connection that wasn’t written on any wall,
unanticipated, walked into, kinda out of place.
 
Was it this venue or that, or another entirely?
The detail doesn't count. It could be any place.
 
On our first date we shot some pool. Don’t know
if you let me win or even the name of that place.
 
The only thing I remember well is that we met
& somehow we were always back at your place.
 
A passionate whirlwind, kind of all-consuming,
but never too much. Nothing out of place.
 
You let me be who I was, never tried to change me,
proudly took me to all your favourite places.
 
You set out your stall sometimes; I didn’t have to.
If you weren’t there it felt a little like no place.
 
But we were young & it couldn’t burn forever.
I was not enough & suddenly I felt out of place.
 
But looking back now I remember the energy
& how for a while we were in the right place.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 8, 2025

A Poem a Day (715): The meaning

 
The meaning
 
The message on our journey
is to listen. To learn. To speak.

    To dream. To imagine. To welcome.
    To be welcomed. To rest. To play.

        To understand. To be understood.
        To share. To dare. To inhabit.

            To value. To be valued.
            To connect. To act. To fulfil.

                To touch. To reciprocate.
                To hold. To be held. To love.

                    To become.
                    

                          To be.

 
Vickie Johnstone, April 3, 2025

A Poem a Day (714): Musical notes

 
Ever spent a long period of months when you felt life was on hold or that time had stopped, that you were sitting in the waiting room, but you didn't have a reason or a plan or knowledge? A time lacking in communication or interaction? I wrote this poem based on a feeling that I'd missed something, that there was something I didn't know, and as I was thinking about it, I started thinking about a character, who was initially gonna be a woman waiting at a station with no destination, but it turned into a guy who had written a letter to a woman who never received it. And I imagined the note as a living thing, carrying this lightness, which turned into a weight as it was never delivered. And it made me think what might have happened if she'd read it. It's a poem about missed opportunities and sixth sense, and invisibility. It's one of those. It makes you wonder how much you miss in one lifetime. It's about feeling versus knowing.

Musical notes
 
He can’t live with it
tethered in silence,
always locked inside,
so he wrote a note,
just for her.
 
But she never read it.
 
It travelled between places,
swept up by the west wind,
caressed by strangers’ hands,
misunderstood.
 
She lived her life in flow,
swept up in rhythmic tides,
never heard his story,
never knew what he held inside.
 
He kept his heart quiet.
 
Somewhere, this note,
it still travels,
experiences many lives,
but never encounters love.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, March 24, 2025

A Poem a Day (713): Walk

 
Walk
 
They say you can’t walk on water,
so take it slow. Build a raft of faith tied
with hope, bypass this bottomless void,
coral devoid of pearl. Cover your scars
 
with someone else’s feathers while clownfish
sway in anemones’ arms & you lose your charms
in wishing, take the hits as they come,
wait for the ever-circling shifting sands.
 
They say you lose nothing in waiting,
only time, but time is everything.
You get your allocation, can’t expand on it.
 
You lift mountains trying to find the thing,
search out this invisible, ever-travelling light.
Blink & you might miss it pass you by.
 
We pause to see ourselves, count our lessons
on calendars already etched with bloody crosses.
They paint obstacles and you excavate tunnels,
pack your bag of treasured things and move on.
 
Gold isn’t gold; it can’t be bought.
It’s the one thing you know, the one thing
they can’t take away from you.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, March 24, 2025

A Poem a Day (712): Numb

 
Numb
 
In the rain
she feels everything,
hears morning rise,
the ache of the world
in the break of dawn,
feels the switch,
a pause she cannot fill,
a sense of emptiness,
the knowing of being
nothing at all.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, March 24, 2025

A Poem a Day (710): Simply blue

 
Simply blue
 
We stand in line upon the sinking time,
curiosity’s stilted mime, this out-of-focus line,
a make-believe that we can be something more,
people in a bottle in a box outside of time,
tripping colour of a something folded outline.
 
The sea curses no one, crashes out sublime
& we are struck dumb by its stark silence.
 
Mindful are we, who we are, who you are,
of the mind, out of mind, even out of sound,
& we are pained by the squares of the round,
yet what we seek is here, not out of time,
it hasn’t crossed the line, so make it mine.
 
Tour the swift seas wide, your wanderings beguiled,
invisible wand, tempest torn, the unbroken wild,
sensing what can’t be seen, hearing every distant shore,
begat, begot, wanting less simply to become more,
free in your lost time, woken now, endure and done.
 
The ocean hears what the ocean wants & needs,
feels what it is, puzzles it out, churns it all inside,
& we are but ghosts watching as dark waters reside,
our audience calm, a woven quilt, all linked beside,
the breadth of us suspended within our sacred breath.
 
Vickie Johnstone, February 12, 2025

A Poem a Day (709): The dip in the book

The dip in the book
 
She colours outside the edges
where ink gathers to explode
the traces of places been & faces seen,
to reinvent every missing moment.
 
She strikes all the right notes,
gets the time right to offer a smile,
offers advice when it isn’t even needed,
struggles to keep her own counsel.
 
She magicks night awake sometimes,
takes flight upon starlight’s ocean streams,
a-wandering in and out of time,
seeks to reorder the crazy things she’s seen.
 
She rewrites every story she’s ever read,
so no implosions, only happy endings.
Meaning lies in the waking hour,
but it’s groundless when she forgets to dream.
 
Vickie Johnstone, February 12, 2025