NaPoWriMo 06

Watch the instruction manual

To change the fingers:
• Hold down the bump in the wrist
below the thumb
and close your fingers.
Reopen, supinate.
• Press the palm twice
to display the line
where your home is.
• Use thumb or ring finger
to advance or retard.
• Press scaphoid bone again
to return to fixed hands.

To change the way your hands wave:
• Hold the pinkie firmly
and press the nail five times.
• Press the thumb against a table
until the nail is flushed and pink.
• Cross ring and index fingers
to move your whole hand
to the desired position.
• Check your pulse with the vein
of your inner wrist.
• Cross your palm with silver,
check the life and heart lines.

To become alarmed:
• Shake your left hand five times.
• Shake your right hand ten times.
• Hold the left hand in warm water,
your right hand in iced water.
• Toggle by switching hands
between basins until
the desired setting is achieved.

Colin Will
06/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 05

napowrimo_05

The Soothmoother borrows a scythe

Let the blade’s weight
do the work. If the edge is keen
the cut slices the sward,
folds it over into a flat parcel
of meadowgrass and herbs.
Keep whetstone and water
tied to your belt.

Grip the handles on the snath,
swipe low, twist from the waist,
keep arms locked and knees loose.
Skim, step forward, skim,
step forward, the rhythm
drives a flat swath
across the field. How you do it,
create a frame of forces, a focus
on the cut line moving on,
and the sweet smell
of mown hay.

Colin Will
05/04/2013

NaPoWriMo 04

On the road South
houses begin brick,
but climate dries
and poverty grows,
and we see it
in the homes
people build.

On the land’s
granite spine
an unseen boundary
is crossed.
Now it’s mud-brick
and thatched roofs.
Neat villages, houses
all aligned West-faced
to Indonesia,
ancestral homeland.

Now in Bara land
with the forests
burned off,
tin-shack territory.

Then, wood walls,
in the roadside dirt,
ever-present chickens.

Finally, the stretch
between Toliara
and Ifaty, poorest
windowless scraps
of boards and plastic,
dirt roads – black mud
in wet season,
strung-out huts
overlook the barrier
reef, and the blue
Indian Ocean.

Colin Will
04/04/2013

NoPoWriMo 03

The big airliner glided in on final approach
for a landing at Beijing. Windows showed nothing
but cloud. Drop-down displays
showed altitude falling, engine notes
fell to a whisper. Forward of the wings
we couldn’t hear the flaps, but we heard
the ‘thunk’ as landing gear deployed.
Fuselage swayed slightly, shook a bit.

Then the engines roared and we lurched back up.
The pilot’s calm voice said because of poor visibility
we would go around and come back
from the Northern approach, slightly clearer.

And that’s what happened; we landed,
shaken a bit, still very tired from the long flight.
Our introduction to Chinese smog,
a scary go-around, and the 5 Ups:
Power Up, Nose Up, Gear Up, Flaps Up, Speak Up.

Colin Will
03/03/2013

NaPoWriMo 02

Waterworld, the seas that surround

the lands of all the earth, are temporary.

They grow and shrink to fill the spaces

between the plates that dodgem

over the planet’s crust.

Iapetus washed Gondwana shores,

the Panthallasic covered half the globe.

Sediments in Tethys formed the Gulf’s oil

before Atlantic opened. Today’s oceans

form familiar blue patterns on maps,

but they too will change with time

and tectonics. Some day the Pacific will close,

as continents come together

in a new Pangaea.

I look out on a smaller sea

that’s swung from land to water

as sea levels changed. Mammoth bones

and tree stumps from Doggerland

are dredged up in nets, when Britain

was a part of the main.

I’ve dabbled in it, paddled in it,

confirmed it’s cold, even in summer,

in this latitude. But the waters

that ring us know no barriers,

pass unflagged from Europe

to America, Africa, India

and circle the chill land at the heart

of the Southern Ocean.

Colin Will

02/04/2013

Prompts for NaPoWriMo

I've given myself this list of words to act as prompts. If I get stuck on a prompt I'll go to the next one. The first one worked OK. It may not be a complete poem, but there's enough there to work on.



volcano
ocean
cataract (eyes)
scythe
lemon
birthday
choir
teeth
lemur
film
wold
program (computer)
plague
birth
red squirrel with blond tail
flames
Ifaty (Madagascar)
Provence
Camargue
horses
passing out
snails
water lilies
corvids
grandmothers
the go-round at Beijing airport (scary)
no heroes
stove
newspaper
weasel
bridge
wine
gout
shieling

NaPoWriMo_01

Under the volcano
little tremors signal
rock-melt rising.

Old fissures open,
pushed by gas front
ahead of liquid magma.

Around the vent pressure drops
and the ground rips apart,
rises, pulverised, into cloud.

Lightning flashes white
against black smoke,
against golden lava.

Red rockets lift off,
rain rock warheads
on the ash slopes.

This is no place
for life, killing fumes
fall from the sky.

Colin Will
01/04/2013