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 book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree poems this month. Prompt #2:
In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.
what am I after?
it’s a kingdom–
no, a queendom–
no, I don’t want to be a monarch or even a painted lady; I’m more like a cabbage white,
nondescript but striking in its way, with the flipsy lilting power to make my own way from plant to plant, from tree to tree, and notice how I fly by solitary, I don’t consult, I leave and go, I come back and my wings become just two of many hands, ears, lashed eyes, lunged tongues flapping at the dinner table and I belong there, and also out here alone between the trees,
sovereign.
draft ©HM 2026
