Theatre and book reviews by Janice Dempsey
The prompt today on NaProWriMo.net is to write a charm, a short rhyming poem intended to solve a problem or heal, in the tradition of mediaeval medicine and necromancy. At the moment the UK has a problem: Saharan sand is being blown from Africa across to the country by a south-west wind (an atypical direction), picking up toxic pollution from the European landmass, and hovering for the last few days over Britain in an area of high pressure. It's causing respiratory problems, eye and throat problems and severe asthma to many of us. So I thought I'd write this charm poem to try to get rid of it:
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Here is a poem based on the prompt for Day 2: a poem based on a myth from a culture other than Greek or Roman: I chose the story of the death of Baldr (or Baldur) the Beautiful, the Norse god of goodness, by Loki the god of mischief, using a sprig of magic mistletoe (since Frigg, Baldr's mother, had made everything else in nature swear never to harm her son.) Baldr's blind brother was involved in Baldr's murder and was punished for it, though he had not known what he was doing. Here's a link to a rather jokey account of the Norse myth and below, my equally jokey poem on the subject. The poem works best if read in rather a sing-song Norse voice. http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/norse-mythology.php?deity=BALDUR
It's National Poetry Writing Month - the challenge is to write a poem every day of April - 30 poems in 30 days. These are necessarily drafts that will be finished later, and it's a great way to stimulate yourself to write. The official site for NaPoWriMo is here but you can find a lot of other sites that pop up in April for the same purpose. Some post a prompt every day, like NaPoWriMo, but others are completely free of direction and are just there for sharing and commenting on their members' daily efforts. I'm going to post a NaPoWriMo I've written here whenever I think it's worth a look. I won't be able to complete the whole month, though, because I'll be out of Internet range for the last four days of the month. But I'll try to post 25 poems. The first poem of the month I wrote remembering the experience of painting the portrait of a beautiful girl, the niece of the cook we employed when I lived as an expat in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I still have the picture, but I wish I had given it to the sitter.
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