NaPoWriMo 1 – Alfie you Fool!

It’s the first day of NaPoWriMo – National Poetry Writing month … now it has grown to include Global Poetry and we have GloPoWriMo.

Anyone can join in, from anywhere. The idea is to write 30 poems in 30 days. You can do what you please with your poems, share them, stuff em in a drawer, blog them and discuss, send to a friend.

This will be my third year participating, and there have been some outstanding gems among all the words. Some verses came out all shiny and ready to be performed, many more still sit there wanting to be tweaked.

I love the rawness of it, not spending days fermenting and editing, just sharing what inspiration comes each day- often I get a passable poem, sometimes I get poetry, and occasionally one will make it to the stage.

Today’s prompt from the website ( http://www.napowrimo.net/ if you want to join in) is to write a poem with short, tight lines, rhymes interwoven throughout, maybe an animal or two, and if you can manage to stuff it in, a sharp little philosophical conclusion.

This is a sad one because, this morning as I pondered the prompt and started to write, there was a crash outside the house. Our beautiful cat was hit by a car. He’s gone now.

Alfie was the most loving cat, his only loyalty was to the lap. We bought him as a ‘ratter’, his ‘Wanted’ poster on The Cat’s Protection website said definitely not a lap cat. How wrong they were. Alfie was a lap skank.

 

The best cat
we ever had,
Alfie,
eternal fool,
crossed
the road
on All Fools Day
before mid-day.
All that’s left
is a whisker
on the mat.
Black and white
hairs on
my jacket,
where
he napped.
The haunting
fact,
his absence
in the garden,
magpie’s relief.
A world turned
monochrome,
rolled over
stained red.
Across the
road
a sign said
‘A361 Lighten the Load’.
I wish it was
a joke.