Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt wasn’t particularly hard. I just wanted it to be more than it was — I had grander plans than a short poem about a news bright. Who knows? Maybe I’ll return to it, and rescue it from its 9-line plight.
Here’s the prompt:
Because today is the ninth day of NaPoWriMo, I’d like to challenge you to write a nine-line poem. Although the fourteen-line sonnet is often considered the “baseline” form of verse in English, Sir Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene using a nine-line form of his own devising, and poetry in other languages (French, most particularly) has always taken advantage of nine-line forms. You can find information of various ways of organizing rhyme schemes, meters, etcetera for nine-line works here. And of course, you can always eschew such conventions entirely, and opt to be a free-verse nine-line poet.
And the poem:
The headline says they are ‘untangling’
Khipu language. Where words are tied
Into knots, twisted into cords, dyed
In colours that have meaning.
Language made tangible. Material.
The way I stuffed my mouth with cloth
As a child, hoping I could weave words
Into something like the khipu
Something that would last forever.
Tea and Breath 