NATIONAL POETRY MONTH
Poem-A-Day 2021
North Florida Poetry Hub is celebrating National Poetry Month by posting contributed poems sent in by poets from all over the world. ~ Submissions Open April 1 until 30th. Poems should be family-friendly. Each Poet is allowed to contribute one poem per day. No poems longer than 45 lines. Please use the "contact us" submission form if you are an outside member. Members submit to Ruth via email. Thank you.
Possibility for inclusion in a future hard copy publication Chapter Anthology with a section for Poem-A-Day poetry exists. If this comes about you will be contacted for consent and permission agreement prior to and will not be included unless this can be obtained. Please indicate and provide good contact information if you want to be included in this possible future publication.
(About poster above) The Academy of American Poets, the originator of National Poetry Month, now a worldwide celebration in its twenty-fifth year, is pleased to announce that twelfth grader Bao Lu from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, New York, has been named the winner of the 2021 National Poetry Month Poster Contest. Lu's artwork was selected by renowned illustrator Maira Kalman and New York Times-bestselling YA author and poet Renée Watson from among eleven outstanding finalists and more than 145 student submissions. To learn more about the Poster and the back-story, visit www.poets.org
If you’re able to support Poets.org efforts, please consider a donation to the Academy of American Poets. Contributions from poetry lovers like you help them to send out 100,000 free posters to teachers, librarians, and more nationwide. TO DONATE TO HELP POETS.ORG and their poster fund, click here: https://poets.org/donate/npm/prl
POEM-A-DAY CHALLENGE
National Poetry Week Poem #1
POST HUMAN
We are not the first
We will not be the last
to stand upon this rock
The victors of evolutionary warfare
Dominant for this moment in time
and blinded to our inevitable fate
Unlike the mastodon
Whose footprints are frozen in the mud
and rock of ages
There may be nothing left to mark our passage here
All traces lost in the coming collapse
of the digital creature we called life
And nothing but ivory towers thin as glass
to serve as a warning
for whoever comes next
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #2
BOOKSTORE BABES
they sip cappuccino
and wander around
feigning knowledge of deep intellectuals
with culture and higher aspirations
reality haunts their heels
and takes a sharp nip
reminding them of the goal
much designed and set to play
as traps are carefully laid
to catch over-hunted beasts
by hungry bookstore babes.
© Ruth Van Alstine 1997
National Poetry Week Poem #3
HOT AUGUST NIGHT
You sit on the porch if you’re over twelve
Or in a tree if you’re under sixteen.
You listen to the hum of the night.
The hazy heat embraces you.
It gives you the warmth
Your mother once breathed into you.
The night breathes... it breathes and lives.
It gives your skin the pleasure of a full stomach,
Your senses the pleasure of relaxed nothingness.
You talk to the darkness, without saying a word
And the trees and shrubs answer.
There’s a fizz in the grass, a scurrying nocturnal.
Your mind is lulled in the August night.
You think of molten memories: cherry-sweet lips, youth.
You play with your thoughts and let the night play along.
You trust the night. You release your feelings into it,
You let them enter the dark to be touched and felt by it
Before you’d retrieve them. You teach the night how to have feelings.
You breathe the warm air in,
And it breathes you into itself.
The unassuming disciple, confidante, soul mate.
You and the August night.
© Andrew Szemeredy
National Poetry Week Poem #4
Lotus of the New Moon
Midnight sky remembers
‘neath caliginous lotus
of New Moon
and screed of stars
Dark
journeys
within itself
and shadows of time
reach out
They conceal and reveal
touch
caress
and encompass
with indigo velvet
Dreams
dreaming all
into forever hopes
before today
and beyond tomorrow
Becoming
© Doc Janning
National Poetry Week Poem #5
Another Blanket for Our Bed
I scoot nearer the valley of warmth
your body has made.
My wakened breath a quicker tempo
than the long steady draw of yours.
In the moonlight, I study the contours of your shape—
the paths that lead to safe handholds and footholds.
And I fear the cold country that lies ahead.
Tonight, the moon, changeable and lovely,
has climbed like a child into the limbs of the chestnut.
It chastises me for my wanton attempt at thievery,
for my insistence on surety. I rise
and pad through the hush of the house
to find another blanket for our bed.
© Shutta Crum
National Poetry Week Poem #6
MY BREATHING; A WEAPON
my first language
was Repression
my father
banned the Portuguese
from lingua de minha mae
to set sail the empired seas
for the white man's navy
minha mae, a foreign woman
from the first country
to invent racism
now
in Wasp country
where here
she was
not
white
only allowed
to speak
what she didn’t know
but her blood did
my black pai
desperate
to be,
or
be free
from
the color
of my mother's
and his father's
ancestry
my white mother
a woman
under
his Patriarchy
i bloomed
broken
as her English
nursed on silence
my first language
a kind of colonized
Portuguese, American
Kriol, the Unsaid
every other word: Subversion
my first language
subversive
my first language
adaptive
as a brown
girl
as immigrants'
daughter
my favorite word:
janela,
window
my most used:
agua,
water
my most joyful
remembrance:
Avo Juice
great grandmother Ju
who’s soft ashblack, paperbrown
hands
smelled like
sodades,
a longing
the Alzheimer’s
couldn't forget
when you
learn a language late or broken
you learn it
as an accessory, a tool, a weapon
when you learn it whole
with the afterbirth
you learn it
like these are your own thoughts
your own breathing
they said
i spoke early
but a broken
made-up version
of what i wasn’t allowed to know
and shouldn't
and so
there are things
in this country
that will never translate
like
the way you believe power
is
power
© Drea
National Poetry Week Poem #7
QUARANTINE
rippling blue water
cumulus clouds sail blue skies
awaiting return
© Ruth Van Alstine
NOTE: the 45 line limit for poems starts here 4/2/2021 - thank you for your submissions! Awesome! :)
National Poetry Week Poem #8
CIRCADIAN ORIENTATION
Before meeting we dated diurnals
who lacked true respect for the moon.
We understand ourselves as nocturnals
for whom sunlight equates to gloom.
We both clock in and out on a keyboard,
commuting just to the kitchen.
We feel our backward schedule is forward
though such may be deemed unchristian.
We treat the printed news deliverer,
who visits at oh dark thirty,
as an actual family member
whom we ask if they are thirsty.
Our blood relations don’t accept our way.
They wish us to act like others
and renounce domestic nightlife for day.
Our habit transcends mere druthers.
© Stephen Stokes
National Poetry Week Poem #9
BEING
To dance and not be the dancer
To walk and not be the walker
Life is in the being not in the doing
To think and not be the thinker
To look and not be the looker
In this way to see more and deeper
To love and not be the lover
To feel and not be the feeler
In this way to be peace
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #10
LASTS
In a world of unknown lasts
Last words, last kisses, last sights, last rites
May I be the first to notice those lasts
And in knowing them recognize the holiness of every
Book left unread
Trip left untaken
Dream left undreamt
Rocking chair left unrocked
Flower left unpicked
The unlived moments that pass us by
The unknown lasts
Known at last
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #11
MOMENT OF SILENCE
There will be a moment of silence
I will put down the phone
You will turn off the computer
The student will study no more
The broadcaster will speak to an audience of none
And we will all glance up
And meet ourselves in the eyes of strangers
The children will emerge from their electronic stupors
The parents will look at them with new eyes
And say very simply
"Hello"
The shop keeper will gaze up and out
Into his city
The hungry and poor will gaze back
And for once their eyes will meet
with no judgement
The imam and the preacher will discover
that the walls and ceilings of their sanctuaries
Are more the barriers to heaven than the way
They will knock them down with a silent roar
And God will fill the space created by their destruction
The left and the right will fight no more
As soldiers lay down their arms
And meet under the shade tree of peace
And the waters of freedom
To wash the blood from their hands and hearts
This moment of silence
This brief second of humanity
Floats somewhere in the photoelectric corners of the universe
Waiting for birth
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #12
HOW TO BE HAPPY
Wait for that moment
at the end of the day
When the clamor of voices becomes hushed
When the incessant chime of the phone ceases
When the kitchen smells like sunsets and mother's cooking
Wait for that moment
when dawn breaks
When even the birds stop and take notice
When the trees raise their arms and point to God
When all heaven and earth tremble from the silence of the beauty
Wait for them
Memorize them
Fold in to and around them
Until those moment are all there is
and all there will ever be
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #13
LAMENT
How long has it been since you sang in the shower
Walked barefoot on the earth
Plunged in to the briny depths of the ocean
and felt the burn of the water in your nose and eyes
When did you last speak a truth no one wanted to hear
Walked through your house naked
allowing the curves and bumps of you to shake along
without judgement or concern
Wielded your ninja sword and fought off the demons in your mind
I last held a rollie pollie when I was ten
How can 33 years have passed
without the wonders of the dirt and her creatures
passing through my mind and hands
And as the list grows
I become painfully aware of the mask of adulthood
The skin I wear, the words I say that mark me as complete
grown, a finished product of the system
Who no longer remembers the joys of youth
Or the wisdom of childhood
And the loss of those joys is the tragedy of my life
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #14
I BELIEVE IN MAGIC
I believe in magic, don’t you?
For what other explanation
Is there for the beauty of a sunset,
Or the rustling leaves by soft breeze?
Most folk would say,
“Tis only the world spinning
Round its sun,
Simple science, really.”
But those of us with special eyes
See the world differently
And reject the explanation of
Logic, theory and knowledge.
With innocent naïveté we see
Earth, sun, sea and stars as being
Spun by fairies dancing in the moonlight,
And worldly troubles caused by grumpy trolls.
Yes, I believe in magic,
To beat back the black edges,
Keeping one foot moving forward
To stay in the warm sunlight.
Others might say, how naïve that
Girl, dancing in the mists of the Valley,
Not acknowledging the dark before her,
Logic does tell blackness will succumb her.
Oh, yes, I believe in magic,
It gives me want to breathe
With joyful song lightheartedly.
And that’s enough for me.
© Ruth Van Alstine
National Poetry Week Poem #15
FOUNDATION
True joy has no home in the heart
until grief has laid the foundation...
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #16
LIVING IN EXILE
Worn by dreams she sat in the dark
next to the cold cast-iron stove
converted from wood to gas.
And when the sun returned
to warm her in spring she uncovered
the gardens that others had left behind.
It was not the white-hot sun
she’d known in her land
where colors flowed
like silken robes
inside the stench
of poverty and putrid waste.
Scratching the cold wet soil awake
she learned to like the stretch
she felt in her legs. Baring
the dirt of its sodden decay.
she found phantoms in the mountain
shadows, imagined she died again, her
dying a memory, a place where
beauty and sorrow walk hand
in hand silence ten paces
behind. When her daughters ask
how she’d been as a girl, she doesn’t think
to give them the answer she knows they are wanting.
We learned to let each other be,
she tells them. After time passed
we let each other be alone so long
alone was who we were.
© Nina Heiser
National Poetry Week Poem #17
BREATHLESS
from lofty offices
views breathless
birds soar high
in azure skies -
heaven’s sentinels
© Ruth Van Alstine
National Poetry Week Poem #18
Corona come softly
look me right in the eye
your power will fail you
as our courage does rise
*
this we shall weather
together we share in the storm
breathe through your heart love
this world we are part of
may ravage us now
but this isn’t the norm
I’ll dress in deep scarlet
dance like wild orchids in may
to the songs you will sing me
we’ll salvage our treasures
and take our small
pleasures today
we’ll measure the distance
Corona keeps us at bay
we shall not be broken
our force is our token
like the sun we shall rise
in radiance true harmony
*
Corona go softly
your time has drawn nigh
close your watery eyes
© Nina Heiser
National Poetry Week Poem #19
POEM-A-DAY CHALLENGE
National Poetry Week Poem #1
POST HUMAN
We are not the first
We will not be the last
to stand upon this rock
The victors of evolutionary warfare
Dominant for this moment in time
and blinded to our inevitable fate
Unlike the mastodon
Whose footprints are frozen in the mud
and rock of ages
There may be nothing left to mark our passage here
All traces lost in the coming collapse
of the digital creature we called life
And nothing but ivory towers thin as glass
to serve as a warning
for whoever comes next
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #2
BOOKSTORE BABES
they sip cappuccino
and wander around
feigning knowledge of deep intellectuals
with culture and higher aspirations
reality haunts their heels
and takes a sharp nip
reminding them of the goal
much designed and set to play
as traps are carefully laid
to catch over-hunted beasts
by hungry bookstore babes.
© Ruth Van Alstine 1997
National Poetry Week Poem #3
HOT AUGUST NIGHT
You sit on the porch if you’re over twelve
Or in a tree if you’re under sixteen.
You listen to the hum of the night.
The hazy heat embraces you.
It gives you the warmth
Your mother once breathed into you.
The night breathes... it breathes and lives.
It gives your skin the pleasure of a full stomach,
Your senses the pleasure of relaxed nothingness.
You talk to the darkness, without saying a word
And the trees and shrubs answer.
There’s a fizz in the grass, a scurrying nocturnal.
Your mind is lulled in the August night.
You think of molten memories: cherry-sweet lips, youth.
You play with your thoughts and let the night play along.
You trust the night. You release your feelings into it,
You let them enter the dark to be touched and felt by it
Before you’d retrieve them. You teach the night how to have feelings.
You breathe the warm air in,
And it breathes you into itself.
The unassuming disciple, confidante, soul mate.
You and the August night.
© Andrew Szemeredy
National Poetry Week Poem #4
Lotus of the New Moon
Midnight sky remembers
‘neath caliginous lotus
of New Moon
and screed of stars
Dark
journeys
within itself
and shadows of time
reach out
They conceal and reveal
touch
caress
and encompass
with indigo velvet
Dreams
dreaming all
into forever hopes
before today
and beyond tomorrow
Becoming
© Doc Janning
National Poetry Week Poem #5
Another Blanket for Our Bed
I scoot nearer the valley of warmth
your body has made.
My wakened breath a quicker tempo
than the long steady draw of yours.
In the moonlight, I study the contours of your shape—
the paths that lead to safe handholds and footholds.
And I fear the cold country that lies ahead.
Tonight, the moon, changeable and lovely,
has climbed like a child into the limbs of the chestnut.
It chastises me for my wanton attempt at thievery,
for my insistence on surety. I rise
and pad through the hush of the house
to find another blanket for our bed.
© Shutta Crum
National Poetry Week Poem #6
MY BREATHING; A WEAPON
my first language
was Repression
my father
banned the Portuguese
from lingua de minha mae
to set sail the empired seas
for the white man's navy
minha mae, a foreign woman
from the first country
to invent racism
now
in Wasp country
where here
she was
not
white
only allowed
to speak
what she didn’t know
but her blood did
my black pai
desperate
to be,
or
be free
from
the color
of my mother's
and his father's
ancestry
my white mother
a woman
under
his Patriarchy
i bloomed
broken
as her English
nursed on silence
my first language
a kind of colonized
Portuguese, American
Kriol, the Unsaid
every other word: Subversion
my first language
subversive
my first language
adaptive
as a brown
girl
as immigrants'
daughter
my favorite word:
janela,
window
my most used:
agua,
water
my most joyful
remembrance:
Avo Juice
great grandmother Ju
who’s soft ashblack, paperbrown
hands
smelled like
sodades,
a longing
the Alzheimer’s
couldn't forget
when you
learn a language late or broken
you learn it
as an accessory, a tool, a weapon
when you learn it whole
with the afterbirth
you learn it
like these are your own thoughts
your own breathing
they said
i spoke early
but a broken
made-up version
of what i wasn’t allowed to know
and shouldn't
and so
there are things
in this country
that will never translate
like
the way you believe power
is
power
© Drea
National Poetry Week Poem #7
QUARANTINE
rippling blue water
cumulus clouds sail blue skies
awaiting return
© Ruth Van Alstine; previously published in "A While Away" March, 2021
NOTE: the 45 line limit for poems starts here 4/2/2021 - thank you for your submissions! Awesome! :)
National Poetry Week Poem #8
CIRCADIAN ORIENTATION
Before meeting we dated diurnals
who lacked true respect for the moon.
We understand ourselves as nocturnals
for whom sunlight equates to gloom.
We both clock in and out on a keyboard,
commuting just to the kitchen.
We feel our backward schedule is forward
though such may be deemed unchristian.
We treat the printed news deliverer,
who visits at oh dark thirty,
as an actual family member
whom we ask if they are thirsty.
Our blood relations don’t accept our way.
They wish us to act like others
and renounce domestic nightlife for day.
Our habit transcends mere druthers.
© Stephen Stokes
National Poetry Week Poem #9
BEING
To dance and not be the dancer
To walk and not be the walker
Life is in the being not in the doing
To think and not be the thinker
To look and not be the looker
In this way to see more and deeper
To love and not be the lover
To feel and not be the feeler
In this way to be peace
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #10
LASTS
In a world of unknown lasts
Last words, last kisses, last sights, last rites
May I be the first to notice those lasts
And in knowing them recognize the holiness of every
Book left unread
Trip left untaken
Dream left undreamt
Rocking chair left unrocked
Flower left unpicked
The unlived moments that pass us by
The unknown lasts
Known at last
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #11
MOMENT OF SILENCE
There will be a moment of silence
I will put down the phone
You will turn off the computer
The student will study no more
The broadcaster will speak to an audience of none
And we will all glance up
And meet ourselves in the eyes of strangers
The children will emerge from their electronic stupors
The parents will look at them with new eyes
And say very simply
"Hello"
The shop keeper will gaze up and out
Into his city
The hungry and poor will gaze back
And for once their eyes will meet
with no judgement
The imam and the preacher will discover
that the walls and ceilings of their sanctuaries
Are more the barriers to heaven than the way
They will knock them down with a silent roar
And God will fill the space created by their destruction
The left and the right will fight no more
As soldiers lay down their arms
And meet under the shade tree of peace
And the waters of freedom
To wash the blood from their hands and hearts
This moment of silence
This brief second of humanity
Floats somewhere in the photoelectric corners of the universe
Waiting for birth
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #12
HOW TO BE HAPPY
Wait for that moment
at the end of the day
When the clamor of voices becomes hushed
When the incessant chime of the phone ceases
When the kitchen smells like sunsets and mother's cooking
Wait for that moment
when dawn breaks
When even the birds stop and take notice
When the trees raise their arms and point to God
When all heaven and earth tremble from the silence of the beauty
Wait for them
Memorize them
Fold in to and around them
Until those moment are all there is
and all there will ever be
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #13
LAMENT
How long has it been since you sang in the shower
Walked barefoot on the earth
Plunged in to the briny depths of the ocean
and felt the burn of the water in your nose and eyes
When did you last speak a truth no one wanted to hear
Walked through your house naked
allowing the curves and bumps of you to shake along
without judgement or concern
Wielded your ninja sword and fought off the demons in your mind
I last held a rollie pollie when I was ten
How can 33 years have passed
without the wonders of the dirt and her creatures
passing through my mind and hands
And as the list grows
I become painfully aware of the mask of adulthood
The skin I wear, the words I say that mark me as complete
grown, a finished product of the system
Who no longer remembers the joys of youth
Or the wisdom of childhood
And the loss of those joys is the tragedy of my life
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #14
I BELIEVE IN MAGIC
I believe in magic, don’t you?
For what other explanation
Is there for the beauty of a sunset,
Or the rustling leaves by soft breeze?
Most folk would say,
“Tis only the world spinning
Round its sun,
Simple science, really.”
But those of us with special eyes
See the world differently
And reject the explanation of
Logic, theory and knowledge.
With innocent naïveté we see
Earth, sun, sea and stars as being
Spun by fairies dancing in the moonlight,
And worldly troubles caused by grumpy trolls.
Yes, I believe in magic,
To beat back the black edges,
Keeping one foot moving forward
To stay in the warm sunlight.
Others might say, how naïve that
Girl, dancing in the mists of the Valley,
Not acknowledging the dark before her,
Logic does tell blackness will succumb her.
Oh, yes, I believe in magic,
It gives me want to breathe
With joyful song lightheartedly.
And that’s enough for me.
© Ruth Van Alstine
Previously published "Fairies and Fantasies" 1996 & 2016
National Poetry Week Poem #15
FOUNDATION
True joy has no home in the heart
until grief has laid the foundation...
© Erin Cowart
National Poetry Week Poem #16
LIVING IN EXILE
Worn by dreams she sat in the dark
next to the cold cast-iron stove
converted from wood to gas.
And when the sun returned
to warm her in spring she uncovered
the gardens that others had left behind.
It was not the white-hot sun
she’d known in her land
where colors flowed
like silken robes
inside the stench
of poverty and putrid waste.
Scratching the cold wet soil awake
she learned to like the stretch
she felt in her legs. Baring
the dirt of its sodden decay.
she found phantoms in the mountain
shadows, imagined she died again, her
dying a memory, a place where
beauty and sorrow walk hand
in hand silence ten paces
behind. When her daughters ask
how she’d been as a girl, she doesn’t think
to give them the answer she knows they are wanting.
We learned to let each other be,
she tells them. After time passed
we let each other be alone so long
alone was who we were.
© Nina Heiser
National Poetry Week Poem #17
BREATHLESS
from lofty offices
views breathless
birds soar high
in azure skies -
heaven’s sentinels
© Ruth Van Alstine
National Poetry Week Poem #18
Corona come softly
look me right in the eye
your power will fail you
as our courage does rise
*
this we shall weather
together we share in the storm
breathe through your heart love
this world we are part of
may ravage us now
but this isn’t the norm
I’ll dress in deep scarlet
dance like wild orchids in may
to the songs you will sing me
we’ll salvage our treasures
and take our small
pleasures today
we’ll measure the distance
Corona keeps us at bay
we shall not be broken
our force is our token
like the sun we shall rise
in radiance true harmony
*
Corona go softly
your time has drawn nigh
close your watery eyes
© Nina Heiser
previously published in Of Poets & Poetry Vol 47.3
National Poetry Week Poem #19
MORNING MEDITATION
Indigo, dahlia, aubergine:
Shades of nautical dawn.
As light unfolds from infinite darkness,
A new day has begun.
© Juliana Romnes
National Poetry Week Poem #20
INKS
In midst of nowhere,
A human did stand,
With bitter to stare,
Lost, displaced in a land.
As the brown willow to call,
The sorrowful but crestfallen bird,
To hold nathless not to fall,
Tranquil, soundless for no word.
Neither the gloomy skies do blow,
Nor the woeful day to go!
© MOHAMMAD SHAKOUR ALGHNASH
(MEHMET GÜNEŞ)
Syrian Educator and Writer
Ankara, Turkey
28-12-2020
National Poetry Week Poem #21
Isolation sought
while we mask humanity
on pandemic's face
© Ruth Van Alstine; previously published in "A While Away" March, 2021
Displayed in Hope At Hand's JAXPoetryFEST Downtown Jacksonville, Florida April, 2021
National Poetry Week Poem #22
Our Sponsor
North Florida Poetry Hub is a chapter of the Florida State Poets Association and was created by the local nonprofit Hope at Hand, Inc. to support and help the arts flourish for poets, writers and lovers of all things poetic and artistic in the North Florida region.
POETRY. WELLNESS. HOPE ~ Hope At Hand is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides art and poetry sessions to vulnerable and at-risk youth populations. Using creativity, language, art and therapeutic approaches, we facilitate healing and personal growth for children and adolescents.
Learn More: HopeAtHand.org
North Florida Poetry Hub is Funded in Part by Generous Donations From
