Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a middle grade book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree drafts this month.
APR 13
First read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe. Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.
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the bamboo forest
the vertical green, notched and jointed, and the damp fug of summer,
bladed leaves that we know the pandas eat– should we maybe too try,
as a way to bite through this tight tropical hidden no-one’s land unlike
woods of any have we seen here in the four-season midatlantic? poles
receding upward into air, yellowing prison bars wearing flags of sky &
never have I, always the shortest in the class, never have I been shorter,
yet here tower I through eyes raised, longering limbs lingering amid
the dim whine of bugs and the gong of alone, a little hollowed & lost in
the bamboo forest–if you too are here, we’ll only know by the reverent
calling of our names.
draft ©HM 2026
