NaPoWriMo, Day 3

Photo by Kitera Dent via Unsplash

I woke up to the wonderful news that my Day 2 poem is featured on NaPoWriMo today!🎉🎈😍 I had a little internal celebration, then went shopping for food, because reality in the shape of my husband knocked on the door to tell me it’s Easter tomorrow and we don’t have anything in the house to eat and the stores will be closed on Sunday and Monday. Then we had a dog to walk and kids to feed and a house to clean and laundry to do and and and… All of this to say that I’m beyond grateful for the kind words this poem received and please forgive me if I have yet to respond to your congratulatory messages. I’m looking forward to returning your kindness in spades.🙏💜

Today’s prompt challenges us to “make a “Personal Universal Deck,” and then to write a poem using it. The idea of the “Personal Universal Deck” originated with the poet and playwright Michael McClure, who gave the project of creating such decks to his students in a 1976 lecture at Naropa University. Basically, you will need 50 index cards or small pieces of paper, and on them, you will write 100 words (one on the front and one on the back of each card/paper) using the rules found here. (Full prompt available here.)

Normally, had I had more time at my disposal, I would jump at the chance of doing something creative like this, but I have to leave the card-making part for another time. I did write down a list of words, not quite 100, and will add to it in time. What sparked the actual poem was my realization, while searching for that one abstract word to include on the list, of how little I love the word ‘love.’ Which of course, made me question what that means. Then the first few lines came and I found that I didn’t hate the word ‘love’ in them as much as I thought I would. I took it as a sign (of something good, I think) and added a few words from my list to the poem (moss, tree, wind, dog). ‘Grass’ and ‘sunset’ and ‘sea’ didn’t make it into the poem, so they are in the image above.

PS–As in past years, most of the poems written this April will remain online for a couple of days, after which they will be replaced by an excerpt, an erasure, or a thoroughly amateurish art piece that will only allow for bits of the original poem to peek through. At least, this is the plan. The reason being that, at some point, in the hopefully not too distant future, these drafts will undergo revision and begin their multiple-year pilgrimage through the slush piles of many a literary journal. So help me, O Muse. (OK, I totally plagiarized my own post scriptum from last year. Why amend something if it’s not broken?)

PPS–The posted poem has expired, but here’s a whole menagerie to keep you company (and a line from my poem as caption). I see a unicorn and a uni-goat (technically, a unicorn as well) inside a choral reef, surrounded by pollywogs and jellyfish. Don’t see any of them? No problem–come back tomorrow. There are plenty more invisible creatures where these came from.