NaPoWriMo Day 28: The Black Heart

NaPoWriMo Day 28

The Black Heart

by Ruqaiyah Davids

Her black heart beats
Quietly.
The sound is almost indiscernible,
Strangled by all her black words.
Black words muffled by black verbs.
What is left for her in this black world
For which she lives?

Grey spots of dishonesty and hypocrisy
Cement her black heart.

The black hurts.
The more it hurts
The more she spurts
Forth black words,
Littered with traces of red pain,
Oozing from her veins.
And it is hard for her to refrain;
She paints the walls
In her hurricane
Of mistakes,
Breaks
And the masked face.

_______________________________

 

NaPoWriMo Day 27: The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

NaPoWriMo Day 27

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

by Ruqaiyah Davids

The distant sound of your treachery
Rudely shakes me out of my reverie.
My life is in jeopardy.
The story told
Is a fable old.
You’ve lost me again in your conspiracy.
True, this!
I am lost in the abyss
Of your lies and your myths.
Ignorance indeed seems like bliss.

The pen is mightier than the sword
And the lies you write have me floored.
And for the record,
This ending has already been told.
Unequivocal.
Not radical—
It’s emphatical.

Mightier than the sword
Is the Promise of my Lord.
The truth is a whisper
While your lies roar.
But hold on,
Just wait.
No, we won’t retaliate.
We won’t duplicate
And replicate
All your lies and hate.
We’ll only try to educate,
And abrogate
Your inaccurate and distorted
Version of this story.
And we’ll restore our glory—
No, not by the sword,
But by the Pen of our Lord.

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NaPoWriMo Day 26: The Ghost Poem

NaPoWriMo Day 26

The Ghost Poem

by Ruqaiyah Davids

On either side the river lie
long fields.
And through the field the road runs by
And up and down the people go,
gazing.
Round an island there below
aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
By the island in the river.
Gray walls, and gray towers,
Overlook a space
And the silent isle imbowers

Slide the heavy barges trailed
By slow horses; and unhailed

But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land?

Reapers, reaping early
Among the bearded barley,
A song
That echoes cheerly
From the river clearly.
By the moon the reaper grows weary,
Airy,
Listening, whispers…

There she weaves night and day
A magic web
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,

Shadows of the world appear.
Sometimes a troop
on an ambling pad,
a curly shepherd-lad,
in crimson clad,
Through the mirror blue
The knights come riding
She hath no loyal knight and true.
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights.

Silent nights.
The moon overhead,
Two young, half-sick shadows.
Dead.
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NaPoWriMo Day 25: Our Ballad

All out of stories.
It’s all been written before.
Anything I write now
Will just be picking at an old sore.

I was asked to write a ballad.
But our story—how do I tell it?
I’ve written it down many times before;
Each time hoping that I’ll learn a little more.
About you,
About me,
About where we began,
And where we ended.
Each time I tell it
I’m left suspended.
Each time my mind writes our pages
Our story is extended—
An alternate ending;
The truth keeps bending.

When I tell our story
We are different.
We seem simpler.
Happier.
Lighter.
Our future seemed brighter.
Or maybe I’m just a bad writer;
Maybe I keep getting the story wrong.
Lost in the throng
Of who we could have been,
Should have been,
The signs we must have seen.

But that’s our story;
Told a hundred times before.
The truth still unsure.
Our never-ending,
Unrelenting,
Heart-wrenching
Ending.

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NaPoWriMo Day 24: The Suckiest One of Them All

The Sucky Poem

Day twenty-four
Is sucky, for sure.
It kept me blocked for four days—
No, more.
I couldn’t go any further,
Until I wrote with fervour,
About how I hate day twenty-four.

I mean, to write a poem with anagrams—
Of my own name—
Is not a fun game.

The end.

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NaPoWriMo Day 23: Who We Would Be

This poem is called a triolet. What that means:

“A triolet is an eight-line poem. All the lines are in iambic tetramenter (for a total of eight syllables per line), and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines. This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet. Beyond this, there is a tight rhyme scheme (helped along by the repetition of lines) — ABaAabAB.” [NaPoWriMo]

Well, I changed the rhyme scheme a little. Just a tad. You could say that I’ve re-invented the triolet. You can call it the Ruqaiyah Triolet. Okay, that name can be worked on a bit. So my triolet rhyme scheme goes like this: AAaAaaAA. Genius.

Who We Would Be

Still to become who we would be
Our paths would meet through destiny
Start the journey of you and me
Still to become who we would be
A rocky path we would soon see
You and me were not meant to be
Still to become who we would be
Our paths would meet through destiny

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NaPoWriMo Day 22: Earth Day

The Earth Poem

The One who created the earth
You are
The One who gave me birth
You are

You fashioned the trees
The bees
You sprout out beauty from seeds
You are
The One who paints the sky
Leaving notes of love for us, so high

A glorious ball of fire
Leaves me with an insatiable desire
To acquire
Knowledge of who
You are
The One who lights up the night sky
And lights up my life
I want to challenge the liars
Who say that this is all science
Do they ever stop to enquire
If there is something higher?
If this all happened with a bang, then why here?
On any other planet, I would not be a survivor

You tell stories of love
From the ground to above
It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard of

You colour the oceans
Cause them to erupt with explosions
Your Beauty fills me with all sorts of emotions

You are
Splendour
And anyone who ponders
Will have no choice but to surrender

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NaPoWriMo Day 20: Making Meaning

This is a very short one but I actually had a bit of fun with it. The Day 20 prompt supplied us with a list of very random words and we were required to choose at least five of those words and use them in a poem. This is the result.

Eyes Like an Owl

Eyes like an owl,
Her face is drawn in a scowl.
Her words she does not easily squander—
But they cause you to ponder.
She is an elusive ghost;
Something miraculous at most.

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NaPoWriMo Day 17: Hello To You

Hello to You

Goodbye.
Hello.
Sometimes words seem shallow.
When I saw you,
You intrigued me so.
I was happy to spend all my time
Getting to know.
For days I followed your shadow.
But it took two to do this tango.

Goodbye.
Hello.
You shot me straight, like an arrow.
There were days that I felt hollow.
There would come a time
That my words would be swallowed.
When I saw you,
The world seemed to slow,
And my words seemed to know.

Goodbye
To all the times
That I tried to hide.
To all the times that I shied;
When the words tumbled to my lips
And then there just died.

Hello
To you.
You were always on my side.
Words were born.
The mask was torn.
You were my very own unicorn.

________________________

 

NaPoWriMo Day 16: So Totally Lost in Translation

This one is very wacky. This doesn’t even qualify as a poem. I do not even presume to call this a poem.  I don’t really know what it is–besides wacky. The Day 16 prompt is to take a poem which is written in a foreign language and attempt to translate it only by looking at the words–their form and their sound–and draw our own uneducated conclusions about what they mean. However obviously wrong and absurd these ideas of the translation are. I only ‘translated’ half of the original Spanish poem, Patas Arriba Con La Vida (Head Over Heels with Life) by Maria Mercedes Carranza, because at this point I was tired of doing fake translations. Fake translations are exhausting. Fake poems are exhausting. This is the worst NaPoWriMo prompt to date.

The original:

Moriré mortal,
es decir habiendo pasado
por este mundo
sin romperlo ni mancharlo.
No inventé ningún vicio,
pero gocé de todas las virtudes:
arrendé mi alma
a la hipocresía: he traficado
con las palabras,
con los gestos, con el silencio;
cedí a la mentira:
he esperado la esperanza,
he amado el amor,
y hasta algún día pronuncié
la palabra Patria;
acepté el engaño:
he sido madre, ciudadana,
hija de familia, amiga,
compañera, amante.
Creí en la verdad:
dos y dos son cuatro,
María Mercedes debe nacer,
crecer, reproducirse y morir
y en esas estoy.
Soy un dechado del siglo XX.
Y cuando el miedo llega
me voy a ver televisión
para dialogar con mis mentiras.

My translation:

We are more mortal;
if we decide, what must happen will come to pass
just as it must.
Some might be rumpled, or munched.
No inventing; noon guns are vicious,
peril goes there today; lost virtue.
Errands are my armour;
in the hypocrisy lies his traffic.
Can’t last; pearl and brass.
Can’t lose by jesting, can’t silence it;
he said it was like a mantra:
he especially and desperately left the bonanza.
He made it all the more,
while hasty altogether their pronunciation;
the parable Patriot;
accepting the engine.

The actual translation:

I will die mortal,
that is to say having passed
through this world
without breaking or staining it.
I didn’t invent a single vice,
but I tasted all the virtues:
I leased my soul
to hypocrisy: I have trafficked
with words,
with signs, with silence;
I surrendered to the lie:
I have hoped for hope,
I have loved love,
and one day I even pronounced
the words My Country;
I accepted the hoax:
I have been mother, citizen,
daughter, friend,
companion, lover;
I believed in the truth:
two and two are four,
María Mercedes ought to be born,
ought to grow, reproduce herself and die
and that’s what I’m doing.
I am the sampler of the 20th century.
And when fear arrives
I go to watch television
to have a dialogue with my lies.

Wow, I was so close.

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