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Today’s featured participant is yet again, two participants! First up, we have Eunoia and second, Karen Morris, bringing us a fully-rhymed duplex.

Our daily online magazine is failbetter. Among the poems that they’ve published recently, I’ll point out Jessie Raymundo’s “Memory with Water” and John Wall Barger’s “I Received a Bitter Email from a Good-Hearted Man.”

Prompt: write a concrete poem. In brief, a concrete poem is one in which the lines are shaped in a way that mimics the topic of the poem. For example, May Swenson’s poem “Women” or George Starbuck’s “Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree”.

I am behind by 2 days so will look into this prompt and poems tomorrow. I want to write my missing days first.

One day later…

I read Adapting, by Smitha V. The poet felt the Duplex was an effective form for this telling and so do I.

It's meeting the old and the pain resurfacing, that scares me. 

Old memories scare me and the pain, the past brings with it.
I'm used to forgetting and being forgotten.

        Forgetting and being forgotten takes time to get used to

And Karen Morris even managed to rhyme her Duplex! Kudos. The poem is on FB so I had to take care of rabbit holes.

(Like full-time work’s not chore enough),

Shelves to dust and floors to buff.

Many of us have probably written about the memory of water (I know I have).

Memory with Water

Jessie Raymundo

who carries a pair of Neptunes
in her eyes

Gravity is when
the psychiatrist assessed you
& located a heart that is heavy
for no reason.

like a remembrance possessed by echoes

This poem was superb. So much backwater (no pun intended) story and a drive that flowed like rapid water.

I Received a Bitter Email from a Good-Hearted Man

John Wall Barger

John Wall Barger had me from the start. Wow! And the resolution of the piece is blessed. If only we could all find such peace and certainty when friendships fail.

So twenty years of friendship
ended in a small gesture
like a door sliding shut,

How blessed I was,
it didn’t seem real, like a gardener
who keeps finding seeds
in the creases of his clothes,

Well aware of concrete poems (shape poems), have taught them on the curriculum for decades and occasionally enjoy writing one. I read the example poems anyway. Love all the reading you get to do with Napowrimo.

I thoroughly enjoyed May Swenson‘s, Women and to think it was published in 1978! Wow. And the content of George Starbuck‘s, Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree was certainly different to other concrete Christmas tree poems I have read! And a Sonnet to boot! I struggle to write them without creating a shape on top.

I have no idea of a starting point and I know shape poems can be digitally challenging, but I am in catch up mode and ready to dive in!

Cheesy as it is – I went for the ‘shape of love’ and of course, contoured a heart. Although it currently looks like a map of Australia with the basic prog. I am running!

your eyes which speak whole

stories out into the space between us.