April opens its doors, and with it I step into the quiet ritual of NaPoWriMo—a month of daily poems, of dusting off memory and letting it speak in its own weathered voice. Today’s challenge turns back toward childhood, toward those early moments that quietly foretold the person waiting ahead. This piece is my response to that prompt.
Some have said poetry should comfort, a lantern against the dark—Matthew Arnold among them—but there’s truth in the shadows too. Sometimes it’s the unease, the distance, the unanswered feeling that sharpens our sight.
Here’s my Day Two poem, shaped from that distant edge of memory:
The Shape of Leaving (Garden)
We knelt in the yard where the grass gave up
to dirt turned over by borrowed steel,
my sister and I tracing crooked rows
while my father laid the tools between us
like quiet instructions.
The shovel bit deep.
A dull scrape of metal on stone.
Earth folding over itself in soft breaths.
He showed us once—
how to break the ground,
how to make a place for something to take root—
then stepped back,
watching without watching.
We worked side by side—
hands darkened,
knees pressed into the same yielding earth—
but there was a distance even there,
something unspoken growing between the rows.
The sun leaned west, slow and certain,
like it had seen this before—
like it knew what would come of it.
There was something in the soil—
not life, not yet—
but a waiting,
like everything we planted
was already learning how to leave us.
I remember thinking,
though I didn’t have the words—
there must be more than this,
more than tending what is meant
to outgrow your hands.
We covered the seeds—
row by row, row by row—
a quiet promise
that some things rise
only to drift beyond reach.
And I knew, even then,
I would be the one who leaves,
not to watch what grows,
but to follow the space
where nothing stays.
When the last line settles and the echo fades, the road doesn’t end here. There are countless other voices rising through April, each carrying their own fire, their own quiet reckoning. If you’re drawn to wander further, step into the wider circle of #NaPoWriMo and read what others have written—you can find them here: https://www.napowrimo.net/