POETRY FOR 30 DAYS IN APRIL DAY 4

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 last but not least, our daily optional prompt. Poetry often takes us to strange places – to feelings and actions that are hard to express except through the medium of a poem. To the “liminal,” in other words – a place or sensation that exists at or on both sides of a boundary or threshold, neither one thing or the other, but something betwixt and between.

In honor of the always-becoming nature of poetry, I challenge you today to select a photograph from the perpetually disconcerting @SpaceLiminalBot, and write a poem inspired by one of these odd, in-transition spaces. Will you pick the empty mall food court? The vending machine near the back entrance to the high school gym? The swimming pool at what seems to be M.C. Escher’s alpine retreat? No matter what neglected or eerie space you choose, I hope its oddness tugs at the place in your mind and heart where poems are made.

Here is the image I used

Taking refuge under a pedestrian foot bridge

Another trip around the country for this Sagittarius soul

Another State I have never lived in is where the car stalled

Of course in the middle of the night and miles from the nearest rest stop

The amber hue of the highway lights blanketed the ground as the mists appeared

My usual friends, a wallet, keys, and a cell phone snuggle close to my thighs

No one would be awake if I tried to call home, no one would be able to drive out

I start the long walk to find help from strangers who would rather be asleep

Whistling old songs to keep the focus on the goal, get home

That’s when the drizzle began

My steps quickened, as the jacket that would have provided warmth was left in the abandoned vehicle

The fog thickened so much my eyes almost missed the covering, but my body felt it momentarily

Overhead was a thin walkway spanning the highway and provided a moment of relief

So I climbed the embankment, making my way to the crux of where the footbridge met the earth

The winds had decided not to arrive to drive the rain into my body

And I stayed there for what seemed to be hours as I dared not take out the phone that would reveal it had been minutes

I crouched there as a sentinel, keeping watch for others that could relieve my predicament

But none came, the rain retreated back to dampness falling from the clouds until it was again mist

Sleep was