NaPoWriMo 2014 - Day 1

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.

Tuesday 
April 1st

Portrait of Barua’s Niece

The slow fan span, the ants ran by
all afternoon along verandah rails.
Barua’s niece in all her gold
sat, gazed out imperfectly 
from my canvas. Thirty years ago
she was seventeen years old.

Today I meet Barua’s niece again
in my attic. She gazes out at me
through dust and clutter.
She’s a grandmother, I dare say.

She claimed the picture but I kept it,
a miser grasping to contain her youth.
Her perfect image survives imperfectly
on the unfinished canvas.


© Janice Windle