NaPoWriMo: today’s optional prompt. W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” takes its inspiration from a very particular painting: Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that describes a detail in a painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement.
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| image: Smarthistory.org Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1611–12-- 1620–21 |
Day Twenty Seven-NaPoWriMo-Inheritance
After Artemisia
Hold it! Let me behead Holofernes
Judith sliced through his bones and mass
Poised and gracious
She held him by the hair,
as one holds memory—tight, bitter, unrelenting
The blade didn’t slip; it knew the course
as if rehearsed on sleepless nights,
each sinew parting like fabric,
each drop a psalm spoken backward.
Judith’s
white sleeves, soaked in history—
the kind they won’t write down.
Look! The maid does not flinch,
holds the bowl like scripture.
Not vengeance—no. A translation—
of silence into scream, of memory into blade,
passed down
through locked jaws
and fists clenched beneath silks.
This is not a myth but a survival.
It is not enough to remember.
You must retell it—with muscle, with color,
with the sharp edge of inheritance.
Day Twenty Six-NaPoWriMo: here’s your prompt! Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something “sonnet-shaped.” Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want.
Day Twenty Six-NaPoWriMo-Sonnet in the Language of Wounds
I traced your pulse through silence, vein by vein,
Where starlight sank in skin like whispered thread.
You wore your sorrow soft, like summer rain—
A body blooming poems where it bled.
Your
blood coagulates beautifully,
Each cut a constellation sealed in red,
As if your ache obeyed some symphony
That only broken angels ever read.
You
taught me love is not a flawless flame,
But breath that lingers long after the burn.
You never begged the wound to leave the same—
You only asked the heart to please return.
And
in that hush, where scars became their art,
You healed the world by holding your own heart.
