#NaPoWriMo #Day28 #NoSlouching #SixLines

 

No slouching

She bumps along the edge of the bed

as if the mattress were a familiar shoreline.

What name fits this fierce contest?

She’s inching toward recovery,

gym-bunny rehearsal

for the transfers her body is relearning.

#NaPoWriMo #Day27 #CareIsAChord #Tercet

 

Care is a chord 

First, take a breath as you enter,

survey the scene, scan for signs of progress.

Speak slowly; let her smile make you beam.

When she tells you she is a Christmas Carol,

nod, though she’s not quite sure of the year.

Raise an eyebrow as she tells the speech therapist she’s 20.

Reassure her it’s okay she removes her ears

to rest from the world; recovery is tiring work.

Stay until Dad arrives - care is a chord not a single note 

#NaPoWriMo #Day26 #PondsTwelve #NarrativePoem

 

Pond's Twelve: A Melodrama

The stroke team promised me a plan today,

after Mum’s MRI, and I braced for something clinical,

instead, a slick and cinematic diamond heist surfaced,

but the universe, trickster that she is,

sent ducks instead.

 

Twelve of them.

Masked.

Organised.

Unionised.

Pond level professionals with a taste for chaos

and a getaway route through the reeds.

 

Meanwhile, the witches were stirring the cauldron,

the druids were faffing in stone circles,

and a gladiatrix, soft-spoken museum educator by day,

wielder of the gladius Fulminata by night,

leaned on her sword like a woman waiting

for the plot to catch up.

 

My house, as ever, anchors as the gathering place.

Not for mermaid balls (though there is a tail in my drawer

when I take off my koala skin),

but for brunches on good china,

where check-ins are a sacrament

and someone always brings potato salad

as an offering to the household gods.

 

There is a love story:

my parents, modelling devotion like it is a craft

you can apprentice in.

Lu and I, no longer star-crossed,

just mildly sleep-deprived,

telling our origin myths over espresso martinis

that taste like truth serum.

 

As for the twins

not evil, just damp,

I refuse to elaborate.

Every melodrama needs a shameful subplot

and that one is mine.

 

And listen,

I swear on every feather in Pond Twelve

that no tigers were harmed

in the making of this pantomime.

They simply wandered through the scene,

confused but majestic,

as tigers do.

 

Besides,

plot twist:

I am doing Day 18 on Day 26,

and time, like the ducks,

refuses to behave.

#NaPoWriMo #Day25 #ChesnutInBloom #ThreeMetaphors

 

Chestnut in bloom, hope blossoms
at Kent and Canterbury

Chestnut in bloom,
a lantern for the goldfinch,
a quiet roof for its small bright body,
a place where late spring gathers itself.

Visitors from the hospital rest
in its shade, and
oh, the relief of that pause,
shade meaning more than darkness,
a sheltered space where shoulders release.

Then the toddler,
legs full of certainty,
running toward the road,
until I caught her, and her wave rose
like the first word for stay.

Chestnut in bloom, hope blossoms.

#NaPoWriMo #Day24 #HoldingPattern #OffPrompt

Holding Pattern

I’m eating a Jamaican vegetable patty.  

It tastes normal,  

and that feels wrong,  

because my world is upside down.

I’ve left her bedside.  

I know it’s sensible  

to rest, to eat, to bathe.  

But how can I eat a patty  

when the world is upside down?

I want to be at her bedside.  

I’m afraid to leave.  

Every crow I see  

caws definitively 

is it a battle omen,  

a harbinger,  

or just a crow being a crow?

Friends ask what I need.  

I ask for scraps of poems,  

to cobble together a road map  

through this place  

where nothing points north.

I keep thinking of cats,  

meowing to come in or go out,  

never satisfied,  

always torn between doors.  

That’s me.  

Inside. Outside.  

Wrong either way.

I listen to podcasts about recovery.  

I scroll Facebook and a Timehop reminds me  

I posted about what happens  

to the brain when we die —  

that it floods with a million  

happy memories.  

Please let that be true.  

Please let her be warm with them.

I text cousins and aunts.  

I busy my hands  

while the crucial 48 hours  

count themselves down.  

We’re 24 hours in.

I’m torn between sitting at her bedside  

and not wanting to get in the way  

of the people trying to keep her here.  

My traitor eyes won’t stay stoic.  

I know it hurts her to see me cry.

I’ve come home  

to collect photo albums,  

and things to read aloud,  

because they say you can still hear.  

So I will speak.  

I will tell her she is loved.  

I will keep vigil,  

even when I step away.

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day23 #Pendulum #OffPrompt

Pendulum

Tonight, 

off‑prompt, 

I fluctuate

fugue-swing
 Weigh gratitude in one hand, 

fear in the other. 

Hope flickers. 

Grief breathes. 

I’m too tired to choose a feeling, 

so I let them all sit beside me 

until sleep's mallet seduction.

#NaPoWriMo2026 #Day22 #ManagementTrack #ConversationsWithYourself

Management Track
The boar snorts, says leadership is a path you scent,
not a rota you laminate.
Management counts acorns; leadership knows
which forest needs re‑growing.
I tell him I’m tired of holding clipboards.
He tells me clipboards don’t stop a charge.
“Walk first,” he says, “then others follow.”
“Root deep,” I answer, “so the ground remembers.”