Day 28: Index 2023

I’ve been waiting for a good prompt to unleash something a bit special. Index sounds just right. See if anything about this poem seems familiar.

Prompt 28: Today, I challenge you to write your own index poem. You could start with found language from an actual index, or you could invent an index, somewhat in the style of this poem by Kell Connor.

Index 2023

I thought
I knew how to make you, poem.1
I will resist you, pushing through the pain.  
My mind cannot be changed, you understand.2

Yet, this is a fairy-tale and  
it should be told as such.3
I knew a woman surnamed Sleep 
who would not come to bed.4
She wanted to watch
just not by herself
I know how she feels.5
In despair of not being 
she felt like she never was. 
I understand that now.6
Elusive – what was that word again?7

My blood remembers
why it paled abroad.8
Empty thoughts offer no consolation to a frustrated poet.9
The shadows will try to find
entry to your soul and throat,10
unseen glinting yellow green mean.11
Little rivers inside me 
all they want is to flow.12
The sound of rushing water is heavy on my brain 
as a heron watches a duck duck 
in a still river,13
my unseen, unseeable, 
very very near, actually 
just concrete  
pond.14

Naughty kittens wearing mittens
chase the bewildered deer.15
To the wounded deer,  
even the rustle of a blueberry bush 
sounds too much like violence.16

Dear poem, I want you 
to rise above the noise.17
Savour the aroma of my slow-cooked rump.18
Move next door.
Go live in the woods. Wear green. 
Pull a sword from a stone.19 
Make beautiful nonsense filled with words
and fill the spaces between words
with more words.20
Leave your word lines behind and 
migrate into this lazy light.21
I will improve, come night.22
The night ripples with words waiting to take flight,23
all hued and rued by bedtime tales
told by stars to other stars.24

This is the crotch of poetry, 
giving birth to words. 
I offer you a bouquet of them.25
They’ll still be free to dance
just like they used to26
until we got it right
until it became music
until it became poetry.27

I trek on, 
heedless of sign and season.28
I do not fight, I am not
fire, I am flame.29
On my own, 
I’d found the me that I was meant to be.30

Have you guessed it? This is a cento, made of favourite lines from thirty poems written this April by you, my co-participants in this year’s NaPoWriMo! Not a word has been changed, just a few capital letters, line breaks and punctuation marks.

These are the 30 included poets with the links to their poems or blogs (if any poet prefers, I’ll remove the link):

1. Romana Iorga. (The poem has expired. Her latest poem is here.)
2. Dr Paula Aamli: Decaying Daisies
3. Nataša Božić Grojić: Vasa’s Cake
4. Christopher Perry: Nominative Determinism
5. Xan: Hail
6. Lex Leonard: Prismojen
7. Angela van Son
8. Gloria D. Gonsalves: Homecoming in Red (The poem has expired. Her latest poem is here.)
9. Ken Gierke: Empty thoughts ~ American Sentence
10. N. K. Hasen: Shadows Lurk in the Corner
11. Barbara Turney Wieland: Crocodiles
12. Chandni Girija: Why do I Write?
13. Ruth Berkoff: Easter Saturday
14. Alana Prochuk: Heather
15. Punam: The Gardenias of Grace
16. Elizabeth Burnam: Green Flash at Sunset
17. Selma Martin: Li’l Linnet
18. Montaffera: Hopping to It
19. Donna M Day: One hundred ways to find the One
20. Angela Smith (Flutterby): To Do List
21. Kerfe Roig: Abstracted and Possessed
22. Smitha Vishwanath: I write the life I like
23. Mary Beth Frezon: The Eve of April
24. Mirjana M (Oloriel): Dandelions
25. Judy Dykstra-Brown: Body of Love
26. Elizabeth Boquet: The A Train Remains
27. Bruce Niedt: Calibrachoa
28. Maggie C: Sonnet Sunday
29. 7eyedwonder: Hon(nora)
30. Glenn Mitchell: What Dad Didn’t Teach Me

I spent with you all day today, and all month. Thank you for your words and company!

I came up with two similar NaPoWriMo centos in previous years:

• Art likes to make more of itself in 2019
• On last day of last April: Magic cento