NaPoWriMo 6 – Thirteen Ways of Looking at Current Events or Mount Doom

by krstaten

I.
A far-off haze
of silhouette
stands against a black skyline.

II.
Bare trees, with long limbs
and wiry fingers,
yearning toward the white
in January.

III.
Too muddled in cloud
to be stark,
too distant to be
dangerous.
Some things can exist
at the edge of awareness,
never drawing closer.

IV.
Until the threat grows.
Until smoke billows.

V.
Small things have
great power here,
and few understand the forging
well enough to risk
the undoing.

VI.
Imagine
if gold, when heated,
showed a foreign script–
like legal jargon.
Imagine it masqueraded as a promise.

VII.
Imagine
simple pages of paragraphs.
No poetry,
no Dark Language–
Paper in a frame in the small hand
of a small man grinning.

VIII.
Ugly things come adorned
with fairer-sounding names.
Democracy, Freedom, or Orodruin.

IX.
This volcano is somehow dormant
and bubbling, both.
Somehow hidden,
protected, guarded,
and still reaching its smoky fingers
over everything.

X.
Or else
it has only pillars,
sturdy as the trees,
growing roots that slither beneath
drinking in nourishment.

XI.
Sometimes
someone cuts off a long finger.
Sometimes, some things
go under water
or into the dark. Sometimes,
the evil things wait.

XII.
This is not a time,
we know now,
for evil things to wait.

XIII.
Sometimes all the evil things
are dark. Sometimes instead
they are white, and gold, and marble
and a bad toupee.
Someone
is falling into the fire.

***

Today’s NaPoWriMo.net prompt was to write a poem with multiple ways of looking at things, in the style of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens.

Obviously I decided to go Full Nerd.

My recommendation for the day can be that one, then, and my recommendation of a fellow NaPoWriMo participant: “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Skin” by Lindi-Ann Hewitt-Coleman