Day Eight: You Call Yourself A Poem?
Today’s prompt was to write a poem that uses a repeating phrase and then goes on to contradict itself.
You call yourself a poem?
Look at you. Your lines are
stubby and you lack
imagery. The reference
you make to the peach
is too soft, too sweet, its
sides mushy and shapeless.
You call yourself a poem?
Take a good long look at
your form. It’s as brittle
as a dead tree. If you ever tried
to hold an idea, your
branches would just sn-ap.
You call yourself a poem?
Where is the beauty? I can
see the cracks, now where is
the light? The words that form
you have been scraped from
underneath a mossy rock.
You call yourself a poem?
Shake yourself down.
Adjust your ideas. Take
this graveyard of broken
phrases and dig it over.
Mosaic the words until
it gives us something
that feels more like truth.
Day Seven: No Poems
Sickly afternoon
Body pulling itself down
No poems today
Day Six: Arachne
This poem is based on the myth of Arachne, a mortal transformed into a spider by Minerva, as punishment for weaving a bit too well.
I dreamed of her again last night.
She stood over me, inspecting
the weave I had created, looking
for flaws among its brazen threads.
It shone out with even more
brilliance in the dream – their
wanton lips the red of wild poppies,
lustful eyes a deep Tyrrhenian
blue.
It was a triumph; its beauty
and passion matched only by the
elegance of the gods themselves.
In my dream I watched her
understand a truth:
sometimes a mortal woman can
make the gods cry.
Enraged, she pulled at its threads,
unmade it before my eyes.
She tore me down, transformed me,
told me which was my place.
Now I sit here and spin a new thread.
My children and I are dream weavers –
we create the sky from pieces of glass,
we make sunsets from orange petals.
We are the artists.
We are the spinners.
They call me a monster
but all I ever did was
to try to outshine the sun
Day Five: Full Stop
Today’s prompt was to write a poem in which you hate something small…
You’re always there at the end
of things – you’re the executioner
of the literary world, overseeing
the demise of the sentence –
cutting the paragraph off in its
prime. You’re small, but full
of a sense of your own power.
All the other punctuation marks
have to. Bend to your tyranny as
you herd words into smaller. And
smaller. Spaces. You solemnly
mutilate phrases. Chop down
clauses. Just. Because. You. Can.
Somebody needs to do something
about you. Somebody needs to
end your oppression.
Somebody needs to bring it to a
stop
Day Four (2) Storm
Summer now distant
we meet the first storm
of autumn by the sea;
Amid the delicate pinks and
lemons of the cottages we
watch the lightning shriek
over dunes and trees,
the storm a wilder thing
here
Day Four: A Sunny Day At The Hospital
Today’s prompt was a rhyming poem which references the weather.
Bare arms, plastic bottles
Sunglasses, bleached hair
Backpacks and sandwiches
The hottest morning of the year
Strip lights and monitors
A window out to concrete grey;
Test results and cannulas
Too nice outside to die today.
NaPoWriMo Day Three: The Kitchen
Today’s prompt was to write a poem in which the subject of the poem has an unusual reaction to their job, inspired by Treasure Hunt by Prabodh Parikh.
The heat of the kitchen is enough
to put some off; those that remain are
tossed straight into the maelstrom.
This job is not for the faint of heart.
Today’s menu is a typical mix of
piquant nouns and zesty verbs in
surprising combinations.
Check out our starter of the day
– a delicious little tanka filled with
the creamy song of a nesting thrush.
Or try our conceptual soup: a unique
blend of ideas and spices, designed
for the discerning poetic palette.
Come here. This will be your station.
You’ll finely chop dreams and mix
them with a sense of longing, before
steeping them in the strongest
poetic juice locally available. A tiny
pinch of self doubt. Season generously.
Today’s main course is, of course,
our show-stopping sestina – 39 lines
of pure lyrical elegance with our
own lemony twist. People come
from all over the world for its
unexpected word combinations.
It isn’t an easy job, working in our
poetry kitchen – but it’s one that will
reward you with a life of flavour.
Day Three: Grease
A bit off prompt. The prompt was to write about a memory that glimpses who you would become.
I never liked Grease – the pink ladies
had the faces of the girls who bullied
me and anyway, why couldn’t Sandy be herself?
There were the cool girls
and there were the rest, and I didn’t
want to be pink. Bubblegum never
suited me. My hair never stay permed
and Danny was a liar.
The early nineties were no time to
be different. If you couldn’t be a
flamingo you had to be a duck.
I spent a lot of time learning to
stand on one leg before i realised
that waddling can be more fun.
NaPoWriMo2026: Day One – Three Tankas About Friendship
Today’s prompt was to write a tanka, which is a Japanese short poem, usually with five lines following a syllable pattern of 5/7/5/7/7.
- Donna
A Salford street; red
bricks and grey tarmac. Always
between my house and
yours. Pink T-shirts, white leggings.
The colours of the nineties.
2. Rick
Sitting on the steps
drinking post-rave milkshakes, we
talk of life, love and
everything else. Two hippy
kids waiting for the sunrise.
3. Bebbo
Saw you on the bus
a few years later; you looked
thin and carried a
heavy sarcasm. I wish
I could have helped you, my friend.
NAPoWriMo 2026 Day Zero
Today’s early bird prompt was to use Katie Naughton’s Debt Ritual: Oysters as inspiration to write a poem which references another poet and contains a declarative statement. The poem should be set in a people filled place. My poem is set in the supermarket and references Sylvia Plath.
There are no oysters here,
just rows of vegetables polished
like a child’s teeth. Boxes filled
with shiny bell peppers, their slow
decay disguised enough to make
them palatable. We’re performers
on the stage of late capitalism.
What do you think, Sylvia? How
do you like our world? You can
buy two different types of peach
for less than two pounds. And
somewhere, a bomb is being
dropped on a family. Petrol is
going up and meanwhile a child is
screaming for his mother.
There are six types of orange here
but no oysters and still, the world
continues to drop bombs.
Perhaps it isn’t about the oysters.
Maybe all I really want is to
taste the sea.
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