The prompt for the 19th was to have an “opposite” day, where everything you say means the opposite. So we were to choose a poem (our own or someone else’s) and write it opposite.  Some of the words were challenging as they had no equivalent, but I managed!  I used one of my own poems that I have been working on for a long time and still not pleased with. Not sure this is better, but it is different. I had also reformatted to reverse the indents but that doesn’t translate when I cut and paste.

Old US35 Concrete Bridge (Photo credit: dok1)

When I Return
(Opposite version of my poem If I Leave)

I have always slept in barns, called cellars
home, held fast by walls, in harm’s way
under concrete bridges driven there by high winds.
How gracefully I’d climb over concrete, ridges empty
of rain, empty of weeds that sprout between the cracks.

I’ve dug up my garden, chased away the mosquitoes
that hover among the broken shards of flowerpots.
They buzz their frustration over my shade which has no flesh.

If I return after you, dig up my bones, tear down the stone,
turn under every white daisy, red carnation,
the dandelions that spew their  silk-seed parachutes.

old gravestones (Wikipedia)

Do not pray for me with cut flowers,
gather them in the parlour, place them in vases,
their colour will reveal no questions of where or whom.
Cry now, turn back from the forest,
find me among the branches of its youngest sapling.

Take my body from the ground, my spirit from the air
and hold it firm, speak words of future
do not listen to the stillness of the air, the voiceless

Wikipedia

hum of crickets. Your down-turned lips
pull my energy back to earth.

Carol A. Stephen
April 19, 2012

Lullaby by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (Wikipedia)

So the prompt for Day 18 was to write a lullaby, perhaps for a poet. This started as a baby lullaby but then I re-read the prompt and thought, hey why NOT a poet one?

Lullaby for the Small

In your cradle poet small
May you have no care at all
For the hours of the night
Dream of angels dressed in white
Little lambs and fuzzy bears
Whisper in your little ears
Rhyming poems and little songs
Keep you safe the whole night long.

Carol A. Stephen
April 18, 2012

Carol A. Stephen

The prompt was to write an epistolary poem to an inanimate object and inserting the following into the poem:

1) a song lyric
2) a historical fact
3) an oddball adjective-noun combination (like red grass or loud silence)
4) a fruit
5) the name of a street in your neighborhood
6) a measure of distance.

I got those, but then forgot it was to be a letter…but since this one took me quite a while to do, I think it will have to not quite match the prompt.

T rex, Wikipedia

Dancing in Yucatan

Dinosaurs were of the kingdom Animalia,
phylum Reptilia, node Dinosauria,
even their scientific taxonomy different

from classes of extant species Archosaurs
vanished when the Cretaceous–Paleogene
extinction event sent a bollide colliding

with the earth somewhere
in Yucatan the old dinosaurs
rolling in the deep waves

of shock and tremble the newborn crater
teaching them to dance over impact-
melt rocks and breathing impoverished air

In Yucatan, campesinos planted henequen twisted   

Henequen farm Yucatán Peninsula Wikipedia

its fibre into twine into carpets fermented
juice of the agave’s ripe core for licor

Twenty miles away in Merida
on Camino de Miguel they dance, drink
tequila with lime wedges  They wait

for tourists
for December
and the new mythology.

This shaded relief image of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula show a subtle, but unmistakable, indication of the Chicxulub impact crater. Most scientists now agree that this impact was the cause of the Cretatious-Tertiary Extinction, the event 65 million years ago that marked the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs as well as the majority of life then on Earth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Carol A. Stephen
April 17, 2012

The prompt for Day 16 is to choose one of three pictures and write a poem based on it.  Here’s what I wrote based on this photo, chosen from the NaPoWriMo prompt.

When I Remember You

your face in shadow, this
double image, your face
two faces one forward, one
away. My fingers would reach

to touch your cheek, touch
only the ocean breeze, the light always
behind you, your features in-
distinct. Always at dusk, even

your silhouette a blur of black on
purple sky. And I, never quite
knowing if you turned
toward me or away.

Carol A. Stephen
April 16, 2012