Richard White's Poetry

NaPoWriMo Day 30 Where Words Fail, the Dark Keeps Speaking

NaPoWriMo closes not with a crescendo, but with a quiet unraveling—language thinning, meaning dissolving into something colder, more observational. Today’s piece leans into that fracture. Inspired by the flattened, almost clinical tone of Russell Edsons poem, “Angels,” , this poem examines a figure that exists between …

NaPoWriMo Day 29 – After the Sirens, After the Years

When the Sirens Fade and Silence Speaks The clock turns, but it never truly resets. It only folds time—past into present, memory into breath. Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt draws inspiration from Jennifer Moxley and her poem After Turning the Clocks Back, where the present moment is …

Back to the Bloom: A Psychedelic Birthday Journey Home to Love, Light, and the Wild Within

Today’s prompt invites something beautifully structured yet deeply personal: write a poem where every stanza carries the same number of lines—steady as breath, consistent as a heartbeat—and let it guide the reader somewhere. Not just across words, but inward. Instruction becomes ritual. Form becomes a …

NaPoWriMo Day 26: Ars Poetica — Writing from the Fracture

There’s a long-standing tradition in poetry—dating back to Horace—called ars poetica, or “the art of poetry.” It asks a simple but loaded question: why do we write? For some, poetry is beauty. For others, it’s truth. For me, it’s survival. Today’s poem doesn’t soften that …

NaPoWriMo Day 25 – Whiskey, Defined by Firelight

Day 24 of Na/GloPoWriMo is here ✍️🔥 Today’s prompt invited us to stretch language in multiple directions at once—layering metaphors onto a single image, shifting tone, pausing to define a word, and then circling back to where we began. It’s a challenge in control and …

NaPoWriMo Day 23 – The Art of a Villanelle

What’s so good about Thursday? Well—during Na/GloPoWriMo, it’s another reason to write. ✍️🍂🔥 Day 23 brings us into the world of form with the villanelle—a structure built on repetition, rhythm, and restraint. Inspired by Kiki Petrosino’s “Nursery,” today’s challenge is to create something that echoes …

NaPoWriMo Day 22 – “Two Men, One Fire”

Happy Wednesday, and welcome back to Day 22 of Na/GloPoWriMo 🔥🥃 Today’s prompt leans into something both playful and deceptively deep—writing a poem where the speaker is in conversation with themselves. Inspired by Jaswinder Bolina’s “Mood Ring,” this idea of duality—of being both the voice …

NaPoWriMo Day 21 – What’s in a name

Three weeks into NaPoWriMo and today’s prompt hit close to home.

I wrote about my name—Richard—and all the versions of me that came with it: Ricky, Rick, Rich, Ritchie… even one born from a broken photocopy. Each one carries a memory, a voice, a different kind of closeness.

🌸 NaPoWriMo Day 19 — A Florilegium of Meaning & Memory

Five petals open like a hand—
the iris speaks in silence,
a messenger of hope rooted in grief,
blooming between worlds.

NaPoWriMo Day 18 — Aria for the Boy I Buried

Some poetry demans a stage, the actor’s exiting and reappearing to shed light upon the story, Once more with feeling as Buffy the Vampire would say. Today’s NaPoWriMo challenge pulled inspiration from dramatic, rhymed narrative poems like The Best Loved Poems of the American People, …