POETRY FOR 30 DAYS IN APRIL DAY 18

Hello friend, I am Timothy Kimo Brien, head instigator at Create Art Podcast where we help you to tame the inner critic and create more than we consume. Every year in April National Poetry Writing Month occurs, this is a challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days and comes from the NaPoWriMo site. When you participate you are given a prompt every day for 30 days and you can choose to follow the prompt or not. Each prompt has a commentary with it and a style of poetry that you may not be familiar with. I enjoy it because it stretches my creative muscles and helps me organize my thoughts. I also really enjoy a good challenge. There is also an opportunity to read other people's work as they post on their websites and for you to comment on their work, giving them encouragement or offering a suggestion. Care to join me on this journey?

And now for our (optional) daily prompt! This one comes to us from Stephanie Malley, who challenges us to write a poem based on the title of one of the chpaters from Susan G. Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words. The book’s  table of contents can be viewed using Amazon’s “Look inside” feature. Will you choose “the poem squash?” or perhaps “grocery weeping” or “the blue socks”? If none of the 60 rather wonderful chapter titles here inspire you, perhaps a chapter title from a favorite book would do? For example, the photo on my personal twitter account is a shot of a chapter title from a P.G. Wodehouse novel — the chapter title being “Sensational Occurrence at a Poetry Reading.”

Grocery Weeping

I stand in the store

Mask donned, list in hand

People moving around in a frantic pace

I try to maintain the prescribed distance

But constantly get bumped from all sides

No one is paying attention to each other

Just focused on what is in stock

And muttering a what they can’t find

The shelves are getting more bare

Each time I do the weekly shopping

With more left on the list being unfilled

That what I can find

It takes about a month

For me to sit in the car

After another failed attempt

To begin to cry, alone

I so want to be the breadwinner for my family

Be the stone they can rely on

In these terrible times

I look back at the diary I’ve kept

And see the despair grow with each entry

My wife says it will all be fine

We will make sue with what is available

Besides we don’t need all that meat

Vegetables can be made a million ways

But every trip brings less and less

Its not that we don’t have the money

As that is what the issue was when I was a child

Watching my mother cry when the bill was too high

And I had to put back the food

This is different

This is not supposed to be

This is not the American supermarket

As told to us by Ginsberg

This land of plenty

Has turned into a weekly battlefield of selfishness

This once “great nation” has eaten away at itself

No toilet paper, no precious hand sanitizer

Others have hoarded it

Others have followed the trucks bring in supplies

And raided them while they are being unloaded