Today I used the napowrimo.net prompt for Day 6:
"And now for our (optional) prompt. Today’s we’d like to challenge you to write a poem rooted in “weird wisdom,” by which we mean something objectively odd that someone told you once, and that has stuck with you ever since. Need an example? Check out Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Making a Fist.”
I enjoyed the journey that this prompt took me on. I'm surprised where I settled in my poem, traveling back to November 2023, when I visited my sister-in-law and my new twin niece and nephew in Hyderabad, India. We toured Golconda Fort in the old city and watched the sunset across the urban sprawl, while the hundreds of mosques called to prayer, all at the same time.
How much past we have to cover this evening—
Title borrows a line from Jenny Xie poem here
That evening, we climbed
atop Golconda fort in Hyderabad,
and suddenly and all at once,
the mosques in the city below us
called to prayer, their sounds
colliding together to layer
and unsettle the atoms of
our bodies, making our skin
reach outward into goosebumps.
Suffering and sadness are not
the same thing. And beauty
can be disguised as both.
My mother never told me,
but I’ve always known
the advice of her weeping:
Sadness is destructive
in its way of silencing
everything but itself.
My mother never told me,
but I’ve always known
the advice of her weeping:
Sadness is destructive
in its way of silencing
everything but itself.
This. This is the universality of it all - of poetry-