NAPOWRIMO 2026

She’s a Seductress

lillian1 Comment

Mother Nature’s flirtatious ways.
Lightning flashes, crocus buds,
lilac blooms that scent the air.
Dew droplets on pink rose petals,
fall colors as she bares her leaves.
A silent caress of soft falling snow.

Most audacious of her alluring ways?
Her cunningly sly, seductive wink.
Unlike a camera aperture’s click,
more like a Texan gal’s slow drawl.
Her alluring, magnetically titillating
total eclipse of the sun.


NAPOWRIMO Day 4. April is National Poetry Writing Month!

Prompt for today: “Craft your own short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.” Sorry folks: I don’t do rhyme. But I did write about a weather phenomenon: a total eclipse of the sun.

Photo of lilacs taken some years ago at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum on their annual Lilac Sunday.

I Love Lucy

lillian4 Comments

Long-legged Lucy played with the boys,
Barbies or baby dolls not her toys.
Miniature soldiers marched in her room.
Games with a ball, she really bloomed.

Grown up Lucy? A soccer star.
Local legend, legs are her fame.
Precision, passing and footwork her game.
Pele’s bicycle kicks win acclaim.

Off season? You’d never guess.
Third from the left in that famous line,
a seasoned Rockette
her kicks still shine.



NAPOWRIMO Day 3. April is National Poetrey Writing Month.

Prompt: “Write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be.”

Confession: as a young girl, I always wanted to be a Rockette!

Image by Keith Johnston from Pixabay

I remember . . .

lillian4 Comments

. . . our December twenty-fourth dinners
with Alice’s jello salad and pineapple-coconut bars.
Rather than bowing our heads and saying grace,
we shared cards at the table.
One for my mother, dad and brother.
And theirs to me.

Raising our family,
the tradition continued.
Handwritten notes inside meant the most.
Some just covered with Xs and Os,
some with a memory from that year.
Always a personalized declaration of love.

Alice’s recipe is long forgotten.
But miles away, with children of their own,
our children still live the card tradition.
Now, almost in our octogenarian years,
we still smile knowingly on those nights
as we reach for the personalized card on our plate.

It’s NAPOWRIMO (National Poetry Writing Month) day 2! Today we’re asked to “write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.” Photo from an old photo album…note the writing at the bottom of the photo. Yep, that’s me with my brother (9 years older than me) and my mother.

Nature’s Way

lillian3 Comments

Dew drops on petals.
Nature’s evidence of rain
or her sweet soft tears
singing Cry Me a River
for humanity’s deaf ear?


Written for NAPOWRIMO (National Poetry Month) day 1’s prompt. We’re to write a Tanka: an ancient Japanese poetic form composed of five lines with the syllable content as follows: 5/7/5/7/7. “It’s like a haiku that decided to keep on going!”

Photo taken last month in San Diego. “Cry Me a River” is an American song first published in 1953 and made famous in 1955 when recorded and sung by Julie London. Justin Timberlake’s 2002 hit “Cry Me a River” is not at all musically similar. London’s version is known as a torch song….listen below!

Dizzy’s Spot

lillian12 Comments

Smoke filled jazz club.
Those in tune tap fingers on sticky table tops,
keep time while rhythmic brushes
swish on snare drum tops.
Others slump in chairs,
empty shot glass littered tables.
I lean forward, waiting . . .
for Sandburg’s oozing saxophones.

Escapists. Jazz aficionados.
Musician wannabes.
Tourists like me.
We all sit while tired bouncer
stands outside struggling to hear riffs
between terse turndowns of fake IDs.
Another night. Another dollar.
A job’s a job. Music or not.


Written for Day 1 of NAPOWRIMO. April is National Poetry Writing Month and the challenge is to write one poem, every day in April. Prompts are given daily at  https://www.napowrimo.net

I’m joining my Australian friends and writing to the early bird prompt for those “whose geographic relationship with the international date line means that April 1 arrives a bit earlier than it does at National Global Poetry Writing Month HQ.” Here in Boston, it’s 9 AM on March 31 but it’s the start of April 1 in Sydney.

The early bird prompt? “Write your own poem in which you refer to a specific writer or artist (or work of literature/art) and make a declarative statement about want or desire. Set the poem in a particular, people-filled place, like a restaurant, bus station, museum, school, etc.”

NOTES: References to Dizzy Gillespie, famous jazz musician; and Carl Sandburg’s iconic poem, Jazz Fantasia. Image from Bing Create.