Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo Challenge 2018

April 6, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Unexpected Leopards”

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Unexpected Leopards

Part of the trouble is that I’ve never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don’t all land like a child out of an apple tree.  Janet Burroway, American writer, b. 1937

Each day, so much goes right.
I find my keys, there is ample
hot water and food, the neighbors smile.

Still, you just never know. Things
can go wrong more ways than leopards
have spots. Trouble can crouch

and spring from shadows you don’t
even see. Last year, one by one, four people
dear to me died. Though

they were elderly, each death
knocked me flat. Inside me, right now,
is a singing joy. It is gigantic,

like a huge blue rooster, ready
to break open a new dawn. And yet,
something else could be waiting

overhead, breathing with quiet
malevolence. Really, how
can we ever know?

Leslie Schultz

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April 5, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Hometown Views”

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Hometown Views

Here we don’t find the same enchantment
concocted by smeary Venetian canals
daubed with painterly reflections.

I can be weary of prairie, especially
in winter, with early spring just
another of winter’s subtly woven hues.

Yet under the bleary lamplight—sunlight—
Northfield can sometimes yield
a veld of vivid pastels, a welter of watercolor.

Leslie Schultz

Paper Birch Near Mill

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Hope to see you tomorrow! Leslie

April 4, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Bear in Mind: Letter to Our Daughter in Moscow”

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Bear in Mind: Letter from Minnesota to Our Daughter in Moscow

The piano, with its diurnal keys,
waits for your touch. Over there, where you are,
night is not. Not now. Night is here to tease
us by promising this faint North Star

can be trusted to lead you home in June.
You are dazzled by onion domes, by rare
juxtapositions of bells. Here, a loon
bobs and dives on the river, while you share

potatoes and fish stew with new classmates,
learn traditions of the old Russian bards,
new street fashions, how a smile equivocates,
enhanced or diminished by spoken words.

As the earth turns–each day a little longer–
we know that you–away–grow wiser and stronger.

Leslie Schultz

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Hope to see you again in April!  Leslie

April 3, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Spring Morning”

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Spring Morning

To approach the poem at the end of your mind
you must keep walking through this new-fallen,

savage-but-sweet April snow. It is, after all,
National Poetry Month all month long, and you

just need to keep going through milky pre-dawn
darks, across the ghostly outline of the labyrinth

to the west of the house, moving without tracks,
without startling the young rabbits grazing

on frost-stiffened grass or halting the rapturous
circling of eagles coursing over black waters

like sails of windmills. Dare to cross over
the Cannon River’s thinnest sheen of renewed ice

on a bridge of concrete and milled steel, knowing
that these cantilevers of form will carry you forever

toward the setting sun at dawn, will guide you
gently, inexorably, down

toward all that waits tangled, unfurled,
glittering but (as yet) unborn.

Leslie Schultz

Thanks to the reader who pointed out yesterday’s missing link to the poem, “A Jar of Buttons,” by Ted Kooser. I have added it to yesterday’s post, and it is also HERE.  One of the books I am most looking forward to reading is Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Kit published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press.

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Until tomorrow, Leslie

April 2, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Fate”

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Fate
for Pablo Neruda

A small hole has opened
beneath my foot,
in the dense woven black
of my cotton sock.

I see startled whiteness—
my granular skin,
clean as a peeled
winter onion.

I skin off the sock
with its tiny new eye,
converse of growth
on white potatoes.

I think to fling it
wherever things go,
worn out of service,
imperfect now;

but, seeing my fingers
bearing their marks—
alluvial strata
of weather and woe—

wound round the toe
of the aged sock,
this moves me to find
a spool of black,

to seek a sleek steel,
(slender remedy)
to thread its clear eye.
To blink. To retry.

Leslie Schultz

I have been thinking a lot about socks lately, as I knit along on a new one most days. Yesterday, I discovered a hole in a (mass-produced) sock I was wearing, and that led to this poem. After I wrote it, I thought of two favorite poems, this one by Pablo Neruda, and then this one by Ted Kooser–with clear evidence that his spare style is appreciated in China!

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Hope to see you tomorrow! Leslie