Personal blog: All opinions are only my own, unless you want to borrow them. (he/him)
Today’s NaPoWriMo challenge is:
[T]o write a poem in which you closely describe an object or place, and then end with a much more abstract line that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with that object or place, but which, of course, really does.
I’m not sure what I wrote for today is quite what they have in mind but it’s where the prompt took me.
I also want to make it clear: This poem does not describe my current workplace. It describes several previous places where I’ve worked.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem about a flower. It didn’t quite go as I hoped. So I wrote about that, instead.
Once again, I decided to try today’s prompt from the official NaPoWriMo site: write a tritina. To make it even more challenging, I used an online random word generator to come up with three words. (From another perspective, this could be seen as avoiding the work of thinking up three words for myself.) With three words randomly generated, writing this poem became mostly an act of galumphing.
I should probably note that this poem isn’t autobiographical. While my heritage is mixed (but overwhelmingly northern European), I don’t have any particular rage connected to it, nor do I yearn for an ancestral sky.
The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is a challenge to “write a poem about food. This could be a poem about a particular food, or about your relationship to food in general.”
Given the importance and prominence of food in all our lives, you’d think this would be a fairly easy task. Instead, I found my mind circling around the topic, jumping from one aspect of food culture to another, thinking about food in a variety of contexts. So rather than try to focus on one isolated idea, I used that jumping-circling itself as the jumping off point for my poem.
Let’s say we make a game:
We create a field,
Assign positions,
Agree on the rules.
You pick your spot,
I pick mine,
Each according to
Our individual talents.
We all play our game
As best we can.
We follow the rules.
We play fair.
But the game doesn’t work.
The official NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to “write a poem in which you explore what you think is the cruelest month, and why.”
Waiting for my Muse
to strike (the capricious tease).
Still I wait. I wait.
April is National Poetry Writing Month and I’ll be participating. I won’t promise a poem a day, and I won’t always be following the daily prompts on the official NaPoWriMo site, but I do plan to write at least two or three new poems a week for the rest of this month.
Here’s my first NaPoWriMo poem:
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
In the interest of full disclosure, getting myself back to health wasn’t as straightforward or as easy as my last posts make it sound. I faced crises on the path—several, actually, at several points in the process. Maybe it would help to share one of those crises here.
The following is something I wrote two-and-half years ago, about a month after I’d started going to the gym on a regular basis. I’d spent the previous few years slowly reversing my inertia of inactivity and had finally reached a point that going to the gym for more serious exercise was something I genuinely wanted to do.
Even then, even with all my new motivation to get healthy, I still found myself close to giving up…
This post is part of my effort to tell the story of my recent health journey.
But what if nothing much changes in your life to make you care about improving your health?
You could just keep on as you are—which means that, eventually, you could end up with some kind of health scare. Better if it never gets that far.
I think there’s a way to build up to caring about your health without a scare and without major life changes—much like how I took many small steps to slowly change my inertia of inactivity, you can generate a momentum of caring. It starts with a necessary first step:
Stop making weight the goal.
John the Librarian 