2023 NaPM 6 April

[RiverNotch]

This 2016 prompt for today got the most replies of all the prompts across all the years, and it seems perfect for this particular year. By milo and Weeded, and requested by TranquilityBase:

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month. 

Topic: Weeded would like to see a poem inspired by the euphoria of the first time you do something (sex, love, drugs, poetry) or possibly inspired by the longing for recapturing that feeling of the first time
Form: any
Line requirements: 8 lines or more

[Mark A Becker]

Seeing is Believing?

By the time you’re 8 your eyes are so bad
you can’t even see the big numbers
on the blackboard. Your glasses are the kind
with coke bottle lenses and ugly black frames.

How did you find yourself on this diving board?
You can barely see the kids bobbing in the water
below you, but you can hear them calling you,
“CHICKEN!”  For reasons you don’t understand

you dive in. And you don’t even know how to swim.

[Semicircle]

Chasin' that high

Callin' from far off they
draw me in close again
and through fumes
I'll climb up to that
checkered flag-

lookin' forward to
fresh air at the
summit.

[dukealien]

First Time Finally


How many tries each ending with
a tumble from Dad’s bike
which was much too tall?

Ten, about.

But that first success
pressing forward into flight, bird-like
terrified, emancipated,
pushing, balancing,
piloting too fast,

(this is great
but how to stop it?)

Oh, yeah, brakes.
But an almost-crash after
is nothing like those falls before–
doesn’t count.

Then returning home a little scraped
but mounted.

[CRNDLSM]

Rolling dough, 
press, fold, too fast!
Stretch, fold, gentle see?
Press, fold, three or four times,
Pinch it, twist it, pat it round, okay?
there you go!
Now do it 200 more times...

[Wjames]

Nothing compares to standing at the altar
with your heart exposed to the light
passing through stained glass
and your lover's hair
as she walks with her father
towards the moment
two become one,
for the first time.

[RiverNotch]

The first time I partook
of the Divine Liturgy, I felt
like I was coming home.
I had only heard the songs,
seen the blue and gold
in still pictures, felt the warmth
of candles or enjoyed
the smoke of incense
separately, in other contexts,
and right there, in the half-light
of an hour past dawn,
it all came together.
I was not allowed, back then, to partake
of the culmination, though the final sense
did not leave deprived:
after the blessing, I was given
the sweetest slice of bread
I'd ever tasted, followed by a cup
of coffee and a thorough
but enthusiastic
conversation. I was home.

[TranquillityBase]

In those days, euphoria came easily:
a poem written to a soundtrack of rain,
or the sight of my muse, 
a 60s Aphrodite in black stockings
disguising imagined ivory limbs.
Days echoed with laughter
and novelty, nights I read Hesse
while incense filled my lair with the East.
I didn’t need sex or drugs
to trigger explosions of the new,
I could summon them, almost at will.

Now rain douses the fires of experience,
the only laughter I hear comes from a cruel sky.
Poems must be cut from from my skin
and my muse is an old woman somewhere
who never knew my name.

[Tiger the Lion]

Learning to Juggle

I highly recommend starting with beanbags;
they're far more forgiving 
to fumbling fingers
than bowling balls 
or chainsaws.

There comes a time 
in every acrobatic life
when you'll need to spin a thousand china plates
and remember they are just
three 
simple 
beanbags 

and sheer will.

[Quixilated]

From this moment on, this is the only thing I ever want to do.

It was lightening crackling through my brain, like chemicals prickling through my veins. It was the feeling of standing at the bow of a ship as it races full sail into the wind.

It was like finding a secret door that leads to a mysterious passage in a crumbling castle. It felt like a shadowy ancient forest full of trees that sometimes seem to have faces and sometimes don’t where everything smells of moss and petrichor and leaf-green sunlight flickers on the forest floor like candlelight. 

It was that feeling you get as a child where you suddenly know that you are a child and desperately wish to stop time and place in your pocket the ability to wonder at the magic of butterflies.

It was like staring at the full moon on a warm summer night and catching the scent of roses and lilac on the slightest breeze.

It was like walking barefoot along a familiar cool-earth path that ends at a friendly door where a wise old woman waits to send you on a magical adventure.

It was a portal, a door, an escape hatch. It was air.

I fell into a book when I was eight years old, 
and I’ve been chasing stories ever since.