🎶🎨NaPoWriMo – 30 poems in 30 days – April 2025 – No. 7🎨🎶

#NaPoWriMo #2025

Here’s our prompt for the day – as always, optional. A few days ago, we looked at Frank O’Hara’s poem, in which he explained why he was not a painter. Jane Yeh’s “Why I Am Not a Sculpture” has a similar sense of playfulness, as she both compares herself to a sculpture and uses a series of rather silly and elaborate similes, along with references to dubious historical “facts.” Today, we challenge you to write a similar kind of self-portrait poem, in which you explain why you are not a particular piece of art (a symphony, a figurine, a ballet, a sonnet), use at least one outlandish comparison, and a strange (and maybe not actually real) fact.

Happy writing!

I Am Not Her - A Shadorma

I am not
her, the statue of
our Annie,
in our town,
holding aloft a book and
clutching at a bell.

I am not
her, Annie Kenney,
but I am
working class,
affected by suffragettes
with the women's vote.

I have not
got her patina,
worn by the
wind and rain.
She rallied all the workers,
travelled the country.

I am not
confined to my plinth,
minus my
small pinkie,
torn off in an accident
in the cotton mill.

She has been
here four hundred years,
so cold she's
almost blue
as a Jay bird on the roof,
of the old town hall.

They leave her
flowers, to cover 
her feet with
bright colours.
But I am not her, and she
is not me either.

So I leave
her now to her spot
in Oldham,
on her plinth,
I am glad to be alive
made of flesh and blood!

©🦊VixenOfVerse,  2025