Parks
There is a theory that a park
is an attempt to recreate the savannah
of our species’ youth;
that Capability Brown,
when laying out his ha-has,
was trying to scratch an unreachable itch;
his inner caveman’s yearning
for hot red soil, golden grass and thorn trees.
How charming it would be to see
Hyde Park with herds of zebra and impala
weaving their skittish way between
the office workers stretched out on the grass
and it would add a hint of spice
for the couples
savouring each others’ bodies in the sun
if every rustle in the rhododendrons
might be a leopard
hoping to crunch their skulls like popcorn.
[S3 tweaked slightly]
If you started reading this blog in the past 11 months, you may not know about Napowrimo. Napowrimo is modelled on Nanowrimo—National novel-writing month—a scheme which encourages people to try to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words) in the month of November. Napowrimo is national poetry-writing month, and the target is a poem a day for 30 days; in April because April is National Poetry Month in the US. And yes, the ‘national’ part of the name is a bit of a misnomer; blame whichever short-sighted person came up with the name for nanowrimo. I’m occasionally tempted to refer to it as wopowrimo or glopowrimo, but I think the name has pretty much stuck now.
Which means that this blog is going to be taken over with poems for a month. I can tell you now that many of them will be truly awful. Sorry about that. I’ll probably write the occasional non-poem post as well, but if you really can’t stand slapdash amateur poetry, you might want to avert your gaze until May.
There’s no convenient central napowrimo website as there is for nanowrimo. The idea was invented by Reen, who was the first ever napowrimo-er back in 2002. I introduced the idea to PFFA in 2005, so this will be my third year. I reckon in 2005 I produced some quite good poems, like this one, this one and this one. Last year I was much less pleased with my output and I didn’t manage the 30 poems anyway. So my target is to improve on last year. In the meantime, here’s a picture of a fluffy kitten:
Max, originally uploaded by Tante Bluhme’s.
Wish me luck.
Flickr set of the week is Letter S by Leo Reynolds. He also has sets for the other letters and numbers.
These photos are available under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license.