Welcome to this year’s NaPoWriMo podcast. This is the first of 30 daily podcasts coming throughout April with poems and prompts from me and other poets. I hope you will be inspired to write lots of new poems. So here’s today’s prompt:
Birds
Let your imagination take flight with a poem about or involving birds. It might be one particular bird or a whole flock. It could be the main subject of your poem or just flit through the background. Here’s a poem about capturing the beauty of birds and putting it on the page.
Bird of paradise
Where? I hear you ask.
See among those leaves?
That dark green one is its head.
See how its beak snips the air
like a pair of kitchen scissors.
Now you see its wings: Great fans of fire,
each feather a flaming arrow.
Its body cools and evaporates
into a white waterfall of tail feathers.
You’re probably flinching at the way
it wields its dinosaur claws as it takes flight.
See how it fills the sky, like an exploding firework,
yet fits on the page, hidden among
delicate strokes of black on white.
Patrick Widdess
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Poetry Non-Stop 
the soft glide of elbow tectonics
it’s an open secret that the best salsa and flamenco dancers
watch hours of birds of paradise before competitions
like a cowgirl
studying the grain of a steer’s unstringed bows
camellia growing unchecked around the crematorium
flower petals even rot almost gracefully
and soon,
like an overturned pepperoni truck
left to nature
bird bones turned hollow
but the way they breathe makes me cough-chuckle in delight
rivaled only by the cherry blossoms dancing in my paper windows
pink trumpets full of air
Yeah, I’m getting to that:
that’s how i ended up in an actual tub of popcorn
how i became a bird’s rescue person in the person rescue program
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Shall we crow
I don’t care what you humans think of me
stop blaming me for your unfortunates
doesn’t black mean ambiguous and powerful?
I always love my voice, specially when it goes with gusty, howling wind
and no matter what time of the day it is
I bet most of you can’t do that
even refuse to hear your own voice
some even rarely speak
forgetting how your lives started
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Crumbs
Because the traffic slows
for me to cross at the busy junction
a seagull dropping narrowly
misses me on the middle lane.
It isn’t to know that I have
just baked a vegan cake
with coconut flour the supermarket
was going to bin. I recall how it
wobbled like a crusty swamp after half an hour
in the oven, and even now is being
divided into generous chunks.
That bird can already smell it
and will be winging into town
to peck at the crumbs and the
burnt corner piece discarded
by a reformed armed robber
on his way to a parole meeting.
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