Sarah D's NaPoWrimo 2022

 I realise too late, I have no recipe to hand down To my children I have no recipe, Handwritten , flour marked Shiny paged with butter  In an old red folder. I have a thousand poems But these are no use for eating  Unless they are- Read when tired or empty, Perhaps they make a kind of method, sense A process you can follow, no, a story, bones and all. But can a story feed us? Sometimes- In this way I kid myself all the time taken typing wasn't wasted When I might have practised another kind of alchemy ,  when I might have inherited And transposed memories of taste and hunger, happiness-  This recipe for recipes

 The wrong order Or menu choices regretted It was grey meat mince wrapped in cabbage skin, jade green and uberboiled. It was like softpockets of organs stuffed back in the body ; there was a cream sauce peppergherkined strangely glow yellow grout white there was a bed of blood tomato jammy smeared There was a crown of bones with a little gristle blowtorched on which necessitated tilting the head owlike to bite into and one strip of tough flesh that needed the eater to rip hard with their canines and simultaneously rend in two with bare hands There was a shiny soup of shoe polish brown and in the ichor a white thing There was a pie as hot as mouthful of hell.  There was the dulleye and dark silver of the unknown two day fish Not at all the same, but as painful in the moment and the memory- I ordered grapefruit sorbet when I might have had a lovely mountain of profiteroles

 Loose interpretations of indexes How Whittlesea uses Sharepoint Part 22 Unask Unbe Uncall Undo Unexplain Unform Ungive Unhear Uninvite Unjoin Unknow Unlove Unman Unname Unopen Unperson Unquestion Unrhyme Unseal Untry Unutter Unviolin Unwake Unyellow Unzip Begin  Again .................. Tota pulcra es, amica mea From the index of classical composers beginning with L I see the name Johannes of Lymbergia, Composer of music for gothic voices. His piece, tota pulcra es, amica mea I mistranslate as 'my girlfriend is all that'. The ghosty voices of El Greco sadly monks Haunt the shadow chapel- No, music, no, the human song. You, you are immaculately beautiful ... From the footballing life of Ruud Gullit How to watch football in secret from behind your bed, while at a café in Montmartre, pretending to be existential. not at all. while also playing tennis, while counting the colours on a dragonfly, Carefully How to watch football in public in the street, not watching your step while s

 The kadapul flower of happiness Is the dearest flower in the world Flowering only yearly  and then only, unobserved At midnight in a great desert But how worthwhile, How wonderful, this effort To see the moon (if there to be seen ) Then wither, silver, fade And cannot be bought

 The donkey of motherhood She wanted to visit the chapel, so full of the portraits of icons, a person couldn't fit in Hip height and upholstered Heehaw heehaw - the mountain path a little steep If she carried what little idea she had of prayer up here, what then? If she carried herself. And the donkey of motherhood, switch tailing  the green horseflies of doubt stood patient  in the village and the yellowbirds of future crashed through the cypress trees

 Apologies for people with these names....would have used my own, but Sarahs aren't endangered ..yet.... Kevins, It is rumoured your name Will be extinct; You do not renew your species I'll take the children To see you in captivity, So beautiful and gentle  Behind the glass of your enclosure  Meanwhile,  Barrys sing beautiful in the new aviary. Barbaras pace the square feet of captivity in a summer dress Oh Pat, oh Pat I see your bright blue  against the hothouse green. Nature, nicely dressed and wild

 Is there a name for what sticks on the shoulder of the cactus like a tiny paper skull (a cactus flower itself)? It also looks so unnecessary and demands thoughts of the dance and dodge of bees between the spine or thorns Has anyone ever Gifted their true love a cactus flower In that way-  (You know, the way of roses and peonies and wild violets)? Just yellow and red and blue, Even a bud?

 Reviews 1. Reviewing the reviewer I. The book lover The character in the novel, described as 2 dimensional, overrode his Freudian conditioning – this is an Edwardian age Austrian novel- and pulling at the corner of the page, dragged it back like a bedsheet and crawled out naked, stood in the room before the reviewer and started to argue. The reviewer, a millennial 21st century man, revisiting an old classic, was not prepared for the immediacy of this guy  -stood right here, not budging.  I am not flat and a puppet of the author, I think you’ll find I’m very much flesh and blood, he said,  and with that punched the critic smack in the face The reviewer of books sighed – it was the third time this week and if it wasn’t punches, it was tears. His sleeve still bore tear marks from where he’d tried to comfort the sparky but ultimately cliched gen x protagonist of a hot new author after he’d mentioned the predictability of the set up. To be honest, he felt like a protest or God himself,  li

 Day 23 Pompeiish I. You don't wear a hat. Wear a hat Your penfriend doesn't  finish school Till 7 But takes a long siesta Ii. I plan  My journey.  Someone told Me dust.  I recall The terrible sun on white walls In any town Iii. Anyone else Watched the landscape on an Endless horizontal - Me and travelsickness  Look ahead Iv. At the house Of Aulia Lucretia,still, Her dark eyes watching V. The place On the hand drawn list with pictures, Next to the pyramids To Angkor Wat to Macchu Pichu Nearer Vi. Thinking about The silkyness of ash, Difficult to clean Vii. I was wondering about History and where Geography Ends. Geology laughs  VIII. The happiness of sun in the corner, The tailless lizard civilization IX. Item no 9 On the itinerary Is always... X. All dogs lie Like sleeping dogs at midday. Though they are sometimes Awake and they May bite. Xi The Americans debate Whether it would be better To dive straight into The volcano Or to wait. XII. In the house of Gaius B. It was busines

 I'm ambivalent about Dickinson and took ages to choose a poem and when I did I didn't like my effort.  So, I did a golden shovel instead, which took absolutely ages.. Here's the original:  Tell all the truth but tell it slant —  Success in Circuit lies  Too bright for our infirm Delight  The Truth's superb surprise  As Lightning to the Children eased  With explanation kind  The Truth must dazzle gradually  Or every man be blind —  The player of chess, the speaker of Latin (The last word of each line spells out the poem)    It is too hard to tell  you everything, dear reader, all  references drift, all the  things that mean something. A truth is truth  itself, and yet a lie, but  still, the joy is in the tell    Like when the poker player puts it  down, the winning card, a half slant  on the table -  See, the success  of sleight is sleight itself, a way in,  a technique to short the circuit,  papering the blanks with paper lies.    He doesn't want to gamble,  luck&#

 The name of this first rose was Emmeline, yes, like the suffragette , a rose with double petals  a pinkyellowwhite thing  The one you planted was Mercy Tall and slender, granting us One mere flower at a time The thorns barbed outward This rose, by the way Is called Sad . The darkest red burned blue at the edge Plant at the garden's end, feed it with silence

 Cleverness Day 21 Cleverness. Cleverness , I think We  Think Too much Of you And that You'll save  Us But  In  An  actual  Apocalypse I'd rather Have  Useful Practical Skills Than Know About Arcane Deities Of pre Roman Italy, For Example Though I suppose There's Nothing Stopping  me Right  now From  youtubing All these  skills I never  mastered Oh well, my last  point was  all too shruggable In a nuclear Zombie  winter When we're hungry Like  Cormac  McCarthy  characters At least  Cleverness Would be  Trying To take  our Minds Off it, Explaining  Why the sky Will  Be pitched black

 An artefact Day 20 ..future misunderstood artefact Under the artificial topsoil in the new gardens of new Liverpool, a drone crew find this artefact - they treat it as a find; they take the thing apart, made of a soft fabric, decayed in parts, but whole. ‘The skin of an animal’, another expert says, 'Honestly the ghoulishness of these people was astonishing' Inside, as we have heard, are many things needed to disguise the human flesh. A tube of ruddier grease, a vial of black , a cloud of dust. Interestingly the core device nestles in the heart of things-.lifeless and screen dark. This says to us the person loved it, but was not enough in awe of it as yet, perhaps a little careless We find the fingerprints on various surfaces, reflective and non-reflective, fascinating - so much stored in the spirals and the sweat on the skin ,whole books, to use the archaic, they weren't sure how to read as yet, in full. Last, for some reason unknown, down among the powder and fluff, a no

 Vvitch Once she was caught And the magic apparatus taken away What they reduced the witch down to  was this- a creature 2 foot tall Behind museum glass, Twig-haired, crow featured, Branchy arms out-stretched -  The puppet villagers stood  stiff and posed in the next display So that witch could never catch them She had no broom, she didn’t need one- was all a creeping under tall trees and a muttering under breath, the sudden rush of the mortals, a cursing of dead roses’ ash When you weren’t looking, I may have shuddered, just a little to see so powerful a thing so powerless,  translated badly, stark and terrible,  from our ancient dreams

 Abcedarian A bit of a slog and cheat! Any  blind  clockmaker will  deal in  empty time.  Fragile seconds  get  hooked in the  inner workings.  Just enough force is needed to  kill the switch to  lag the pace to  make the minutes  nice and even.  Obviously,  prayer has a part to play in the  quiet flow of hours.  Rob one day to pay another.  Substitute day for night.  Time can be brought from other places  Under cover of darkness,  Venn diagrams show how my time impacts yours. What this means for dreaming isn't clear.  X equals  y in the calculation of tick and tock, the simple Zen of clockwork

 Bread for all, and roses too... The valley of the roses  runs for fifty miles along the river scar. In summer, it is dry,  only the ghosts  of the mothers of roses. We stand in the dust, looking  at the hills - here is where earth has torn, showing the soft inside. It's like a religion, I wash it down with water Summer rain and the possibility of next year's roses.

 An edible plant.. What we thought was borage  Wasn't Neither was it alkanet or comfrey Neither was it nettle But the blue was very blue And the green stung  It is vital when weeding To pull up the roots The culling of the thing Won't work Or flypulling the leaves  How green the green was Though and maybe That's enough . There is nothing  but this new thing In the garden. Taste it.

 Nantosuelta (An ancient Gallic goddess of crows and plenty - I read about her in a guidebook while waiting for a ferry at Calais years ago) There is the sea, the crossing, rib boats, a flock landless. Some unearth a shrine, dried flowers and a necklace of bones. I am here,  mine are the scattering crows and the coming of eve, mine is abundance  in unlikely forms. The summer sun on landfill, I am here in the fishreek port, and in the discarded hills Mine is the swelter in the heat, the blue of the sea's edge, the self and its feathers

 Unsprung The red buttercups  growing on the black grass.  Colding weather with the days shortening.  Birds unmaking their nests.  Soon, the fruit will wither  and shrink back to seed,  then blossom on the naked twig then bones of things

 It sounds like the meeting was a child Or perhaps you could also ask the question What is your favourite song What is your everything What is the morning I hope you are a lovely rose I hope you are not the only one who is painted Life is like a bloom. I getup.

 We were like animals, Our backs curved like armour, And our bellies soft, So we didn't show these Our hands had claws And our skulls hair, Our hearts were the size of your hand Our ribs a cage Our eyes could see The colours of flowers Our ears could hear  some birds We knew some of the names of things-  Some we killed to eat, Some others we let die, We feared snakes We were a pack, Alone, a flock We made no sense but with each other We were of our skin and blood and bone and kind. We were animals, we hope we are still animals

Chicken (Kind of Ted Hughes-ish) Chicken scratches the earth Chicken Makes marks in the earth Chicken plumps Up his whiteness And fluffs his feathers  Chicken is thus All hot air Chicken is pillow fodder Chicken is Battle kieved, battered, Spatchcocked, nuggeted When Chicken is God He goes off half-cocked-  He announces the Sun  in the morning  See my works, yes -  Me a doodle doo

 The vicar went off prompt When he, black carapaced, Beetlelined in purple  Went like this- Knock knock On the mahogany Of the second most expensive casket Who's there? The congregation stammered Unsure that this Was in the order of service My grandmother, Difficult even in death Demurred to say her name, remained Silent.  A pigeon fluttered Trapped between the altar  and the eaves

 A bit of an obvious target, but .. Mr Kipling's cakes Not the younger jingoist, The rhyming empire apologist, The fabled cake maker, the imperial court jester, The anthropomorphist. English 'traditions', setting the teeth on edge,   like the unnecessarily thick icing  on fondant fancies  like assumptions of superiority This Kipling is the one receiving the letter, that letter- about the end of John, last seen wandering the mud, halfblind. Poor John, who shouldn't have been fighting of course-  nineteen fifteen, eighteen - any more than anybody's sons who died - the fathers lied.  This poem ends where land does- the big chalk wedge of England  where Kent is sliced by sea and Kipling stands  in the wind, looking towards Europe, but not seeing.  He wears a motoring helmet and kid gloves. Soon, in a small inn in the village (fictional) it will be time for sandwiches, for stirring rhyme for cakes, for tea. All the old campaigns.

 Amanita Citrulina is a queen or Roman empress , yellow white. When the net demands, she rises, sticks her lovely organs in the air - there are various tales written by Cicero or other Romans I have never read, not learning latin, although I read encrypted- french translated by an Insect queen, a book on secret politics by Cicero, hid inside for years, so deathly white, the pale anaemic gestures in plein air, like the hidden city, something rises to stand, shading itself, it rises vellum yellow in the books translating Cicero left in a burning library. Oxygen in the thin air is necessary even for a paled thin queen- inside many lifeforms, some organs will be white as unpopped baby teeth. I've read and not unheard, the scientist Cicero was in fact no scientist. The spores mesh, the itch rises, translation fluid from the bodies, milky white, even though the blood is counted read. This is the birthright of the underqueen, Shakkespeer methods of flying in foul air, and then the rosea

 Hello poem -  Come in, sit down on any  of these chairs,  I'm sat here somehow always opposite I'm listening  Don't worry,  Yes word choice is important But I try not to judge What you have to say Is as important as  how you say it You're an awkward one You play with internal rhyme  Sometimes, and fidget Somehow, I feel You're on the edge of saying  Something worthwhile But never quite Manage it. This time maybe,  the measures will work - the syllable count, the daily pentameter  rep-repetition Tell me about Mum, Tell me more about wonder, Tell me about love or Hide yourself in words Write about your soul in the medium of birds

 Reverse poem Can be read forwards or backwards I want to see like Turner Don't show me the sea I want to find it blindfold By salt and thrift and sharp sand breath Where the drunks wear dryrobes Blankness of beach hut faces The way the air eats plaster alive Wedding cake of white cliffs English bride in military dress swims Channel The water greenbrown heavy jade Can't help but think of rippled glass The brushstrokes snake and I Don't want to paint like Turner

 Overheard The failings of Art Apologies for the no breaks stream. Rudi and Shiloh lovetheinfinityroomssomuchthatsaffronistakingthemforthethirdtime. Rudi wouldlikesaffrontotakethemtoarealhallofmirrorsliketheyhadatafunfaironce,  but saffrondoesn'tagreewhatwiththeveryairbeingprocessedandgreasy. Rudi wantsthatvertigoandlurchofconsciousness,thatconfusionofscalethatonlyfuncanbring. Shiloh climbsuphermother'slegsandscreams. Later, saffron sitstheminfrontoftheYvesKleinblue andasksthemtoimaginetheclearestseasidesky Itdoesn'twork. Shiloh can'timaginefloating

 Sea shanty first attempt Not really a shanty, but a slice of apocryphal family history It should be great great grandad, but that didn't scan.. Great grandad was a sea captain grew up on the ocean wild Great grandad was a sea captain Brought the tea from China Sing, here is the way Up sails, up mast Sing, this is the way To map the past Great grandad was a secret son Set adrift with half a name Great grandad was a lesser son And we are all his children  Sing , this is the way Up sails, up mast Sing, this is the way To drown the past Great grandad was a go between Weight of empire in the hold Great grandad sailed the poppy wars Didn't know his own when he came home Sing , this is the way Up sails, up mast Sing this is the way To carry the past Great grandad kept his manifest Crates of dreams stacked  in the hold Great grandad kept his anger there Deep below the waterline  Sing, this is the way Up sails, up mast Sing this is the way To hide the past Great grandad lived in sepia

 Day 9 What I think of love is this is this, still - it is a sonnet, constrained by fourteen lines and sets of lines within it, the rules which I keep breaking , not believing in them, though I do believe in love, this contradiction though I do believe in contradiction,love. What I think of love is this, now - it is a stream of consciousness like thought itself, I think we love subconscious, because I've tried to  make it sonnets, break and tame the rhyme when it just wants to fly . And all my metaphors are nonsense and are like wonder, religious yet ridiculous, in the face of love.

 The past is a dinosaur egg, Curled and embryonic, Purple peacock feathered, gold scaled, Complicated bones-  How unbreakable  How geological now This shell

 Bumblebees (Apologies to those not aware of the Transformers movies..) You took my hand, it was one of the last times before you grew older and away you were a child. And I asked why Bumblebee was yellow, and shone so yellow, why he unfolded so happily, transforming to who he really was, when, in the circumstances, in the film, the world being what it is, wouldn't it be better to keep origamied up, be nothing but the vehicle? But you said no - It's only when Bumblebee unmakes, remakes himself, that he can sing and dance. I'm digging queen bees from their nest in the soul by the shallow pond I ask you to help me.

 Blessed This plaster saint at the exhibition  whose name I cannot read, but who is painted life-like, dark hair dark eyes, a mourning expression  has the face of his model, some man down on his luck, or perhaps the sculptor's lover and gives a lie to cold white marble. Its been a long day and it's winter. This sitting still to be drawn is hard- he sneaks out every now and then to check the web and smoke a cigarette Which -I know  I know, neither exist yet- just  barely lift the boredom. At least there's drinking money in it. He says to the artist, I hope you sell this piece then sets his face back to sorrow. It's not so hard, he thinks,to be a saint, even after four hundred years of blessing.

 Day 8 Twenty little projects ...not easy  Hill farm blues The land is a sleeping woman. At Chernobyl, the nuclear accident  includes a release of a hundred thousand  bluegreen butterflies He sees a heavy field by the power station And when he touches her rattling fence He knows- great She who sleeps from Carlisle to Whitehaven, I love you. He tastes the reactor release  a flock of mercury birds or hears a suite of quantum computers,  all approximating sentience. He is too nesh to fight the robots, his father said what doesn't kill you  makes you stronger to the broke arm boy. This land-woman wakes. Yan tan tethera - follow the lovely beck  of imagination, a diver tied to a feather stone. Like the fake lake, deeper, She eats a village for breakfast. Kit the rhymer is finding it hard to see, one day this land and poem will either burn or flood. A clever John Deere tractor  announces  the arrivals of Marxist Leninist angels to Her side. Comme ci comme ca, the cow checks likes on the

 Trimeric Day 7 My least favourite food , trimeric Live I always hated liver with a passion almost biblical. I ate anything else, like good child that I was With a passion almost biblical, I loathed it,  pushed it round my plate before the dinnerlady saw I ate anything else -  cabbage, kidney , hair, my plate was always empty Like the good child that I was -  white shirt, all correct, waiting for my helping to be laid out before me

 Reasons... Reasons I cannot find my haiku Those syllables  are good at hiding.  They have  scuttled under my fridge.  They have  hidden  down my sofa. At night,  they nest with sonnets,  by day  they run with limericks. They are so short, I rely on them to  show me truth  Lovely syllables, tell me what is, not just what You see.

 Day 7..from a list From a list of obscure Gods, a new story  "Saehrimnir, the boar, is boiled! The best of bacons!” Saehriminir's unsacrifice In a butcher's travesty of the myth of resurrection each night the pig god is reborn,  to be killed again, fattened on blood and acorns. But I am tired of this Edda, cross reference  this myth with another I call on the godsaint of lost causes, petition Cardea, goddess of hinges to open the quantum oak of the door to Valhalla - let this sacrifice escape into the ever forest - her mouth shuts, the door closes. Petition Terminus, the God of mileposts to let me pass, petition Kalfu haunter of intersections, to let me cross or Tlazolteotl to eat the bones. Petition the nameless god of placeholders to hold the sky in my stead. To feed the hungry at the feast the cloud will be danced in from the hills. I run through the obscure dark of old trees- in the pantheon of lesser gods one less. I'm happy to append this list, I am the thing th

 Nonet on my 'favourite' song. Took me ages to choose the song It's an old cliche, but perfect day walks that sharp edge -  hope and unhope.  We, too, Lou, drank sangria  in the park, bitter red.  And when we went home,  my mouth was stained with promises. I hang  on

 A poem in another language translated by sound alone Day 6 Another difficult poem The original is in Norwegian by a famous (apparently) Norwegian poet. Det er den draumen me ber på at noko vedunderleg skal skje, at det må skje – at tidi skal opna seg at hjarta skal opna seg at dører skal opna seg at berget skal opna seg at kjeldor skal springa – at draumen skal opna seg, at me ei morgonstund skal glida inn på ein våg me ikkje har visst um. That island dreams me bare pale - a no go redundancy of skull sky, a debt marred sky, a today's skull nothing, a heart skull nothing, a deer skull nothing, a forget skull nothing, an elder skull Spring, a dreaming skull nothing, a me/ I gone more, stunned skull's gliding - pale enigma, i hear you with them ---

 She was an extraterrestrial in normal clothes. She stood in a corner, her back facing away, bent over. Are you ok, someone said, are you ill? She began to cough and cough, hand to her chest , other resting on the wall, her whole body leaning into it as though she was exorcising demons of some kind. She was  watching a thing happening she was allergic to it, made her sneeze and choke till finally that thing  exploded from her mouth- pow pow like bullets, or a baby, gunpowdered butterflies, a wet bird, a dogbark, a grief, a piece of meat the laugh

 Day 5 'laughter' In the form of multiple 'shadorma's - my combining two prompts in one They wanted us  to laugh, even as they punched us in the guts, walked away, whistling softly, said we couldn't take a joke. So, we trained hard, nearly mastering  a bad grin, sad Chimps at a tea party in the dying days Lips pulled up over teeth, a warning  if you looked close enough -  a trapped sitcom audience praying for release

 Day 4 Clogyrnach On English and other languages and appropriation and losing languages, language and place…. I found the form very difficult to make not sound like a kind of limerick… This country isn’t mine, I steal its meters and its forms, keel- haul them till they gasp, beat them and then ask now they’re English, how do they feel? Define and rule, don’t let them speak, tight-lip our borders, mute the weak, bore like bureaucrats, claim that that is that, pretend that power is technique. There is a form that draws in clouds, alphabets we can’t speak out loud, words that hurt to sing, the dull tongue of kings used to lull and quiet the crowds. England’s a ship with sad cargo looted and traded   -  and we know we stole our treasure and only measure worth in the value of what’s shown. What does it matter, words for sea what does it matter, words for sea? These sounds run aground, the  swimmers will drown, but we’ve a hundred words for sea. How many meters measure land, how many syllabl

 Bad triolet How small my grief, my joy how great, Since I forgot to know you. The years flew by ,and gone the ache - How small my grief, my joy how great, I think of you for old times' sake but all my fond nostalgia's fake- How small my grief, my joy how great Since I forgot to know you.

 Day 2 Tectatrys Slouched sofa, leather worn, we are both tired. We did our best to repair each other. Surreal Put a line of mourners out to dry  and scrape up what is left behind with a silver, jewelled spatula. The drowning part of drowning gone A vein. A one way drag. A thing you run to find that other element. Some anklet,some collarbone velvet. Stood fishspined, moving your hands. An unsmall, an etiolation, a strawberry lace, an ache that ties bellybutton to stone. A what is wanted, squared and billionaired - Chocolate and Weltschmerz. A goddess submerged so all her limbs  are shell and claspy purses, so they are a refinery,  a special prising tool required, a rawness. Something expected of god,  and because expected, not worth its own name - a kind word. A lottery stigmata, a living teddy from the claw machine.

 Day 1 Moonshot They've found another ocean on the moon They've found another ocean in the earth Cowboys everywhere are shooting for space, Laika's in orbit, circling us now, Werner Von Braun sings Werner Von Braun. Did your Father make a rocket from the remnants of the Sixties, fuelled by white spirit and diesel? Did your Mother make rainbows from domestic trajectories Did you crouch like a child in the capsule? Was America's shadow cast in the desert? Was the flag still waving in the wind that wasn't, in the yard of the last living astronaut? Static Someone sleeps on teams , someone alive before. Someone in the left corner or else it's the right or the left or whatever- someone is trying now to get his attention, someone is waving their hand, so it appears like a ghost in random frames. The hand blurs He is Still Still Time goes Time passes The fly appears, crawls across his face, crawls across the mute screen- no one mentions it, no one comments, no one chats