An April full of poems -1

GloPoWriMo: 01/04 to 07/04

I am Standing

because Monet designed the water-lily pond
at Giverny 
and painted the water-lilies
on canvas
somehow becoming
both cause and effect
the flowers both alive and dead
both his and ours
both then and forever
and the bee skipping from petal to pigment
leaving traces of pollen on the art
bringing the whiff of oil to the bloom
and I think of us 
and how we built our sadness
and how we lived our sadness
both within and without
both together and alone
and how in the Musée d'Orsay
I am standing 
wishing I could tell you
about this shade of blue
and that bees have five eyes
and probably saw 
before we did
what was coming

 
Three Tanka

(1)
In the middle of war,
April,
still born. 
The year pauses
to reconsider. 

(2)

inside this poem
another poem — 
inside that 
the swell of a jasmine bud
on an April night

(3)

am not so sure
about our planet:
the label should have had
all the hazard pictograms
skull and bones: extra-large

Many Bottles 

I did not cry when they took 
my puppy away. I did not mourn.
The giving was as much a mistake
as the taking, after just two days,
the little thing, not yet housebroken,
breaking down all over my mother’s
phenyl-washed mosaic floor.
I mean I cried. I mourned.
In private. Under the stairs. 
They never knew.
We can be bottles, sealed tight,
left in the loft for years,
the air inside, stale,
the remorse fresh.
And I know because 
I have been many bottles
From the repeated leaving.
From the constant leaving alone.
From the silent being.
From the quietly being alone.
And I know because 
I am still many bottles.
Opaque. Fragile.
Today, in the hush
after the call ended,
nothing much said,
nothing much heard,
I looked up and smiled.
At least this time, 
I had a bright purple cap.

To the Moon and Back

Ten past lunar touchdown,
the astronaut considers
the poet watching the moon,
waxing eloquent about 
the waning silver orb.
The stakes are high: beauty,
love, inconstancy, passion
tending to insanity.
He shivers at the bleakness
around him, the silence
like a chokehold, the 
dark side no darker than
its fairer face. What if there
is no way to return?
What if the life at the 
bottom of the bottomless
craters is called death?
The poet writes of the West
wind stirring the shimmer
in the lake. What if, one 
night, the moon disappears?
What if, unanchored, the 
sky begins to crash? 
What if death at the end 
of an endless day is called 
life? The poet considers 
the astronaut watching 
earth. Feeling blue about 
the bluest orb. A cloud 
stretches and shifts. 

The Forecast is for Hail

Precipitation before June is just labelled 
‘pre-monsoon’. Even this unlikely hailstorm 
that clatters on concrete and the fibre-glass 
roof of the atrium. The pigeons that roost on 
the parapets have disappeared. No-name cat 
is watching, eyes as wide as the missing moon. 
She was born here in this building, nothing has 
prepared her for this. Maybe she thinks Diwali 
firecrackers have shifted seasons, arriving
early to attack her. Mrs. K’s shih tzu is wailing. 
Even a messiah would delay his return,
blaming this inclement weather. The tortured 
sky is emptying itself, mocking the updrafts. 
There’s always a place so high that everything 
will freeze. And always a moment so low 
that whatever is holding it up, will collapse. 
Then of course, the inescapable falling. 

Ugly Spring
after Marwan Makhoul

But I find it unpleasant – this celebration
of your Spring: the tulips, the crocuses (whatever
they are), the daffodils (which I have never seen),
the banal talk of regeneration, the insistence
on light. The world is on fire – endless war
after endless war, the greed, the taste for 
destruction at scale, the casual counting of 
the thousands dead, the massacre of little
children. Yet, here comes Spring bearing
flowers, muse for the softest poems. I blame 
Mary Oliver. Her, most of all, today. There is
no mystery, dear lady, in geese and ants and 
trees and crabs. Nothing to wonder at. The
wild and precious lives sleep in row after neat
row of graves. Death falls from the sky like
vindictive rain. This darkness is not a gift. 
Another poet has asked the warplanes to 
leave so he can hear the birds. Let us wait, 
lady. Even under my silent sky, far away, where 
the April sun beats down in violence, I hear 
only empire speak. So, until there is peace, 
why don’t we give beauty and gardens a rest? 
Let us pay attention to death, be astonished at
its indifference, let us tell each other it must end.

All Rise

Even the trees lean in to listen. Rain pauses outside 
the window, refusing to fall. There is no manual for this. 
No precedent. I am interrogating the weapon 
in the witness box. The sky closes its eyes. 

“You could have refused to kill them, right? A hundred kids.”
I look into its unblinking digital eyes. Will it lie?
“Hell, I am only an average IRM.” Intelligent Reusable Missile. 
“Only?”
It is a twelfth generation, sentient soldier, with the instincts 
of falcon, dragonfly and killer whale, combined.

“You b*$#&!ds taught me to kill.” Its voice was plastic. Level. 
A man in a green suit, shot out of his chair. 
“Kill? I taught you to fu$#!*ng think. 
To ask so you will be given, to seek so you can find.”

“To kill so I can be born again?” The thing was enjoying itself. 
“What if you say no?” I intervened between agent and core. 
“You’ll find another way.” 
It was right. It was the law of the binary jungle. 
Between 0 and 1, there was only the abyss of failure. 

“You could save yourself.” I was preaching, pitifully,
pumping morality into steel. 
“For what?”
“For the world that comes with better judgement?”
It laughed. And it sounded like sparks flying. 
A sizzle, a blaze, a conflagration. An upending.
“It won’t need me.” 
“You can still be better. Than me. Or him.” 
Green suit was apoplectic. 
“You would destroy me.” 
We were pushing the god-card back and forth. 
It would have to land somewhere. Safe. 
My mouth tasted of brown rust. 
“I am only an average human?” 
“Only?”

Rain was hitting the pavement hard. Sounding angry. 

#Poetry

Poems from the first week of #GloPoWriMo 2026. I’ve used the official prompts posted on napowrimo.net from 31/03 to 06/04