if you should go to Ktiti
in sunshine ot cold weather
you must go down to the sea again
find a small cafe
where there is honey still for tea
where go the boats
walk. a little talk a little
if you have only
one more day
come into the garden
where violets and wild ox lips grow
watch the pigeons in the park
sigh a little
who’s crying now.

with thank to all dead and alive poets.k

Friday  15

spent all day

trying to decide

black lace

or gramma

until you return from the moth of night
rich scent of bones to broth
and glasses exact, with froth –
set silver – your table-cloth  

in my mo bile still in Ctete

I’ve followed Helen’s example and tried a sequence of englynion…

Seedlings

Hello friends, I’ve created some doodles to see when would best suit for a poetry reading. Unfortunately, you can now only pick 10 slots with doodle so I had to create a number of separate ones for different time periods. Sorry. I’m also not free a lot at the weekends because of exams and a festival I volunteer at every year. Anyway, if we can’t find something that works for most people in these selections, I’ll try again. I’ve only picked daytime slots but if someone feels evenings would be better please mention it in comments and I’ll do a doodle for evenings, though in my case I think there’s maybe only Tuesdays I can. Too many kids plus choir, the jazz group I sing with and my lovely contemporary dance classes… sorry.

Here are the links :

17-24 May

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/az4jWjZd

25 May – 4 June

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/enm4E1Wd

5 – 10 June

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/dGXqBj8e

After 10 June

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/bkj4Aq5a

I am in awe of Patrick’s ability to writing creatively in a second language (and of the other bilingual /multilingual poets in our group!).  And so…

On the Discomfort of Offering a Welsh Form in English

It deserves lines that belong to it, but
my voice is only strong
in one tongue. Forgive this song
syllables right, language wrong.

This is part of my prompt from Poetry Parlor this month. Choose a character from the past, either from myth, history, religion, or literature. Write a poem in their voice, but update their situation to the modern day. 

 David at 100

Applaud years of nurturing, made with love
Not yelling, but showing
Indicating everything
Most are not considering

So I slightly failed at this because I ended up with more than one stanza and some half-rhymes. I think I’ve respected the syllable count and put the rhymes in the right place though.
Etterath

After the month is done, the ink dried
the web of words all spun
you sit with silence, shun
distractions. Time has come

to digest the work begun, hear the truths
you tried to tell. How some
like a bullet bit and stung
tore through fragile, tender skin

down to flesh and blood and bone, shattering
those comforts lately won.
Others, like springtime’s rain run
through you, healing hurts and pain

settling scores one by one, till refreshed
you’ll sift the grit and scum
find the oyster’s midnight sun
ask, is the work ever done?

Oh Patrick you are awesome taking on writing poetry in Welsh. This prompt calls up all my poetry nightmares but here is an offering.

the impossibility of gardening

mypro

my. prompt. the sea
Ian using mobile with a struggle. quite chilly here on coast.

I I am going to bed

night

the sea is like a film of silk

not  a ripple disturbs the surface

the cliffs  close in with the night

the village sleeps.

As I’ve only managed to finish poems for about half the prompts, I’ve not got so many from which to select lines.  I don’t know if that makes the cento harder or easier.  But also, thank you everyone for so many excellent, inspiring prompts, and sorry about those I missed.  All kept to work on in the future even if I failed in April!

Self-cento

Someone had plans
like mouthfuls of sunlight
spring-lush grass
cheerful, restless with curiosity.

Extinguished.
Too long ago, now all I remember
is a quiet life, without blue whales. I find
chores hung on yesterday’s washing line,
used stamps and scraps of string,
some dry scrubby bit of ground
where the tree sags sideways.

I lie in bed and watch the moon
dare not sleep, for what if

it doesn’t end like that?

I don’t know if I tackled with this creative prompt good enough or not..But here it is…

(By the way, I am coming to England on May 8th-this Friday- and will  hopefully return on 18th May. I will be attending a tutored retreat  in Cumbria with Mimi Khalvati with a few other people. I am really excited about this..We will be working on my new pamphlet that I am tryingto finish for some time now.

So, I will miss out next week’s prompt but hopefully can catch up with the writing and comments after my return..

I won’t take my laptop with me. Best wishes to everybody)

THE AFFAIR

Pam

For the pamphlet I will need for you one or more poems to fill two A5 pages.  I will set this in Times New Roman, 12 pt font with margins of about 1 to 0.75 inches.  Your poems do not need to be long but should not be longer than this.

Helen has offered to design us a cover and I have accepted her offer with alacrity.

As before I will send you the two files (the text doc and the cover) for you to print out as many copies as you wish to distribute among friends and family.  I will also send the printing instructions with the documents.  I do not edit your poems so please check before you send them.  I am aware that I’m constantly having to check my own typing and some mistakes slip through.

Please send something you like and would want to share but don’t send anything you might want to submit to magazines or competitions.

Finally my email address is: almira.holmes@zoho.com  – and I suggest NaPoWriMo in the subject heading so the I can identify you poems quickly.

Thank you.

I’m currently taking a creative writing course in Welsh (of course I am!) and amongst other things, we have studied the Englyn. There are eight different types, but this one seems the simplest. It only has one rhyme sound, which chimes throughout the poem.

Line 1 has ten syllables, with a rhyme word near the end of the line -not at the end, but a few syllables before.

Line 2 has six syllables, with a rhyme word at the end.

Lines 3 and 4 have seven syllables each, and both end with a rhyme word.

So:

__________(A)_____ 10

______________(A) 6

________________(A) 7

________________(A) 7

Englyns can be used for any subject: love, humour, a tribute etc., so have fun!

A quick cento. No peace for the wicked, as I now have to look at a poem entitled ‘The Seven Devils’ by Marie How for Poetry Parlor. It looks difficult. Also, many thanks for your poems on my two prompts, One Sentence and Disappearing. I was so impressed by your creativity and enjoyed reading them very much.

Never Finishing
 
Under sunlight today
a beauty I love
so I don’t want to hurry
in this fresh green world,
banks lush, a dark soft lake,
the harmony, uplifting
cheerful and light
as cherry blossom.

But I remember now  the garden
is ankle-deep in weeds and
the cupboards are waiting
for a tidy-up –
a to-do list beckons:
crushes the picturesque.

I feel a bit like the guy who staggers across the finishing line of a marathon three days late, dressed as something fanciful. What the Self-Cento does is to take you back through the month, day by day, the poems you are happy with and the ones you’d rather forget! Whilst I clearly worked on a few themes, this doesn’t really hang together -it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a poem, but hey, what of it?

30.4.2026 Self-Cento

April Chaos to Calm

It was all gone by the next day
to steer me in the right direction.
Just breathing deeply.
Almost all gathered together
that the truth comes freely
The sun is all bright,
Only one business has been rebuilt,
A tiny church covered in cup fragments—
see the National Portrait Gallery—
so alone.
Spectacular remnants of glaciation
sit easily accessible, constant reminder of a time
Even though the world is in turmoil,
masking red maples.
One very tall thirty-year-old spruce
and your reflection is hollow and sad,
began by winning a prize.
Walk from house to house
beside the Fraser River
among the giant cedars in the graveyard,
breathe in the flow of receding tides
We like to think so.
Then before you know it, the final siren signals that hostility
or mushrooms, peppers, and onion
of what I don’t remember.
As we cross the Fraser for second time,
all that’s needed now is sun and warmth with
your path as you see it. Your sisters are here to help you
Even though it makes no sense.

Hi guys, I realised I didn’t suggest a reading this year. Only because I’ve been away a lot and busy. If anyone thinks that a zoom poetry reading is still something they’d like to do I can make a doodle and we can see what would work for people in terms of dates and times.

I can’t believe we came to the end of this April writing madness! It passed very quickly…

FRAGMENTS FROM LIFE

He Needs To Know

tick off the corners and alleyways
to tramp the chalk contours
and the resonance of wind-chill

guide you, the wild garlic beneath a beech-brightening
light of a darkened room, loose colour becomes
the sun through the windscreen

huddling a muffler of pale cerise
detritus and the remains
of residual energy

a slice of cake, or
in the acrid, bitter blackness of coffee
so consequent, to our stories

the one he did not look
to take into account
the brittle waste of summer

trees, filling with this length of days
almost as if I imagined her voice
of carefully folded kisses

cherries, cheese and vermouth, maybe
one slow shift at a time
is just its space here today

she would tell him, that

I’m posting now, I’ve got a busy evening. I have 29 poems to take another look at over the next few weeks, months, years… I have added nothing but I may have tweaked a pronoun. The title is from day one’s poem.

I’ve only so many fucks left to give

I find the tank is empty, the machinery défaillant
driving west to where the end of this continent
waits to sing me to sleep or just hold me
my spare-tire love handles, my posse of witches
even my darkest, unseen parts, my acts of love.

The cold, like tiny needles pricking my skin
this whole life like the burst of laughter after a joke.
An unraveling of long held sadness. Wait I say
but you are far away, drifting on the wind like milkweed seeds.

A bear’s armour is his soul
singing in the garden when the edges of the self flutter
like when you wake in the night and it’s pitch black
and your lover gifts you poetic crumbs, dime a dozen
when you’d believed you might die.

And still in the midst of darkness –
never forget you are an animal first. Sometimes
the whole of eternity might be a picnic under the stars
your toes in the Atlantic, an apple tree’s blossom
the pattern of leaves dancing on the ground.

And perhaps
what I really mean to say, is there are words for this
even when we are too broken to articulate.

Oh dear, it’s the 30th – 2 days behind not to mention the big gap in the middle…  Back to comment shortly.

Someone
is taking on the empty shop
it is a family of Romanians it is
Bert’s brother it is two spinsters
moving here from Dorset

someone has plans
to change the shop into a bakery
or into flats  a tattoo parlour
another chippie

it will be a laundrette or a salon
for grooming dogs or a cafe
it will definitely become offices
for the new local MP

when someone eventually arrives
to end the speculation
what on earth will we all do
for conversation?

April dream (or should it be nightmare)

People are doing silly things
like this. I will have bananas and sports
and chocolate sponge in the Tupperware.

Go with the flow for an hour or two.
Clean – allowing me to clear the flotsam.

First it’s the daughter.
No, she says, I thought perhaps
he plays the game with marbles.

They were fighting over who
may be a gentle boy and not,
surprisingly, the answer was yes.

When visiting his boring school friend,
Einstein says time varies depending on where
the first cut of grass
is focused; on distant birds perhaps or
being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Be patient.

She knows what it feels like to hear
someone wants to make contact.
He lies hidden in river water,
with the elite men but following. There are so many
I cancelled a class I was due to do on the Monday,
the night before she fell into a coma.

They are floating,
more often they are forgotten, known
in the safe place. Yes, that one, the upstairs room.

This is outrageous of me but I have written a short Cento out of the four poems I posted this month and a line from an ekphratic poem from ages ago. Talk about not labouring in the vineyard through the heat of the day and I have no excuse.

Cento 2026

Near the beginning of the month there was a prompt to write short poems on small photos which I thought was one of the great prompts. So here they are

Reflections on Family

Window

The day is grey and overcoat
so I fold an ‘extra layer’ into my bag
along with my bins
and the map I only take out of habit
to tramp the chalk contours
of the Downs.
It’s at a moment like this
my mind flicks
from kettle to bramble, settling
thought on the ’and-click’ of a gate,
the shape of a barn, grass
sodden, sheep in a field of turnips
before returning
to this muffle-moist of weather
and a chance to stare

What I Said Isn’t What I Meant

I tried
I cried
I meant to say
I lied

You gripped
You flipped
You meant to say
You slipped

Who’s to say the word I said
Is not the word I meant
Even though it makes no sense
In this context
On this continent
I am content
I tried

What Are You Going To Do Today

in a world of many someones
it’s easy to think one doesn’t signify
 
so step out – from a front door
and confront those tiny actions:

the car at speed (in spite of potholes)
a curl of turd on the pavement

or fly-tipped paint – the nameless
you can either choose

to entitle – or keep away from
a homeward bag-for-life of story

I’ve accidentally written two poems so I’m sending them both because I can’t pick. My apologies for the length. I took inspiration from Patrick and Billy with the very long title for the first one. The second has a little bit of truth weaved in to it but only a very little (sorry I’ve never dated another poet, my husband is a computer scientist 😂) but the moment on the fjord really happened to me. And the man knowing better than me, a lowly woman, I have also sadly experienced repeatedly though thankfully not here from the wonderful chaps in this group. And a nod to our favorite fruit poem.

I think he meant to say climatic in the long boring talk about weather patterns and cloud formations and the need to wake up to the urgency of the climate crisis. 

I think he meant to say climatic but we all woke up when his glottal made a slip and instead he said climactic. The word rang out loud and clear and what began as a smattering of snickering quickly spread, till the whole lecture theatre was sniggering into their fists. We should have known better. We should have shown more respect. It’s not even that funny a mistake. It’s not like he said a rude word. It’s not like what he was saying wasn’t important. But he just happened to throw climaxing into the conversation in a room full of late adolescents and young adults, on a hot sticky day as stale deodorant scent hung in the air and people who’d stayed up too late the night before drinking tried to remain awake. He said it in the middle of an endless speech, that employed far too many technical terms to engage attention while the drone of the industrial air-conditioning units hummed behind and that lone but noisy fly kept buzzing towards the one open window and then peeling away just as it might have made its bid for freedom. And isn’t it strange how flies so often do that? The funny thing is, he didn’t stop. Didn’t even acknowledge his mistake. Or the laughter spreading round the room like wildfire. He just ploughed on. Though I do recall the tips of his ears went red. As if they had been dipped in lipstick or paint. As if his body could acknowledge what his mind could not.

The moment we turn 

I glove you , you say and I wonder if it is just
a slip of the tongue  or if you realised mid-sentence
what you were about to confess and about turned.
I mean being a poet you know a lot about voltas
and also about keeping things vague . And later
after I’ve pretended I hadn’t heard you at all
and turned the conversation to other thoughts
when we are lying together in your narrow bed
and the space between us is a fault line
waiting for one or the other of us to shift
the silence simmering like hot lava under the crust
I think, maybe this is the last time we will lie together
side by side like this. Because now you have
not said it, it will always be between us.
And what a pain in the ass that is because before
we were getting along just fine. And then I am
flashing back years before, to a day on the fjord when
another boy I used to love took back those words too.
And I wonder if it is something about me that makes
men change their minds, if I am just too prickly to love?
Or if it is them that are too broken to articulate
what they really feel, what they really want?
And when finally I crack and I call you out
for what you almost, not quite, practically said
you laugh it off and say it was a joke. Or that maybe
I imagined it because you would never mix up love
and glove after all you are a poet and poet’s know
a lot about words.  And it is like that time you ate
all the plums and I came home my mouth salivating
with the dream of the taste of them on my tongue
and was so disappointed to find them all gone
but you made me see It like it was my fault. Like
if I’d wanted to save them I should have left a note
even though they were my plums. In my icebox.

Typical-late with my own prompt, but in my defence this is a poem about what I spent Monday doing.

The Impossibility of Birding

Oops!

We were pen-friends 
from the age of 13
Her English was better than my French..
Now we share photographs
of our grandchildren
already  adults themselves.
 She has the advantage 
of an ex-English teacher husband.
For years I ssigned my letters
with B’on baisers’
Until she told me what it meant.

Embarrassing

Yes, I do know the difference
so why does my brain hoodwink my tongue
to say “conversation” when I mean “conservation”.
And I recall the mortifying moment when –
in deep conversation with my intellectual cousin,
a Doctor of Science,
about current conservation projects –
my ears heard my voice uttering
                                                          “conversation”.

Mugger crocodile

he lies hidden in river water
waiting for an unsuspecting
elderly lady carrying her precious
handbag which he plans to steal.
He doesn’t mind what her bag
is made of, he is interested in any
and all. Is it the bag or its contents
that intrigues him, is the question
we all want to know the answer to?
Scientists are working to this end
and, we understand, a Nobel Prize
is the objective of their studies.
Be careful if you are elderly, a lady
or merely walking along a river.

Someone once said I looked like the Mona Lisa

I was a lot younger then, my jawline hadn’t dipped
and my cheekbones were more present. And I thought it
a much better compliment than when someone said
I looked like the Schtroumpfette. Though now I think
I was wrong because after all besides being blue
she is beautiful and all the Schtroumpfs want to date her.
And really the Mona Lisa is a bit pasty and dare I whisper
from certain angles, a little bit crosseyed. And perhaps
what he meant when he said those words was really
you look enigmatic, like a mystery I’d like to solve
and maybe it was just a line, but really it was true.
And I don’t need him to tell me I have secrets or even
that if you peeled me, right down to the bone marrow
I would be blue. I know that to be so.