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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 2021: Welcome

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 2021: Text

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


Poem-A-Day 2021: Text

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

Poem-A-Day 2021: Text

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

Poem-A-Day 2021: Text
2hah-circle2.jpg

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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

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