#NaPoWriMo Day 6: Watermelon.

It’s summer once more,
And there’s sweltering heat,
The ceiling fans don’t work
Even at their highest speed.
Everyone I know takes to the floor,
Leaving couches and beds behind,
For they could never offer the comfort
That comes from marble, mosaic, or granite.

The hot air, too heavy to breathe
Wraps around us– thick, serpentine,
You could feel consciousness slipping,
With no care for the passage of time.
Then comes a welcome reprieve,
As the afternoon mellows out into evening,
The air is kinder, calmer, easy,
You could almost see the breeze coming.

The heat will come for us again,
When the sun rises on the morrow,
But for now, there’s chilled fruit on a plate,
Sliced, and sweet, and scrumptious.
The family sits around, as always,
Digging in, relishing in the taste–
I let the flavour kiss my lips
Like a prince undoing some evil curse.

Laughter echoes around the plate,
As we work our way through,
One slice after another,
As much as we can eat.
In that moment, I forget the weather,
As I take one last bite for the day–
It tastes like the splash of cool breeze,
It tastes like I’m mocking the summer heat.

~© Shubhangi Srinivasan

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Today’s prompt via napowrimo.net was to choose a row of prompts, and make the word from the first column the title of the poem, and to use the words from the two other columns in a poem describing the taste of the word from the first. The focus words I chose for today’s poem are: ‘watermelon’, ‘splash’, and ‘mocking’. I love how today’s prompt is an extension of yesterday’s. It sounds incredibly tricky, but it was really not. At least, not to me.

One of the things that has been a constant in my life, growing up, is that every time summer rolls around, it is almost tradition in our household to spend lazy evenings on the weekends, sitting on the floor, around a big plate of chilled fruit. Mangoes and watermelon, mostly. But it happens so much over the summer that I just knew how I wanted the poem to go, today. It’s not nostalgic, and it’s definitely not something that is unique to our family, but the fact that it happens in so many other households as well makes the poem relatable. I hope you think so, too.

In fact, my family sat around a plate of sliced mangoes just this evening. I think it is just one of those things that you never really think you’d ever write about because it’s so mundane and universal. But I think it’s beautiful that some of us choose to write about these ordinary moments in our lives because not all of us are living glamourous, larger-than-life stories. And when I come across poems that talk about how naughty somebody’s cat is being today, or say, a poem about a lost sock (which was actually written by my best friend, who is also an amazing writer), I think it’s wonderful that we make art out of the ordinary things in life.

This has to be my favourite part of the summer, though. Writing poetry along with so many brilliant writers around the world, every single day for an entire month. There’s nothing but a love for art to unite us and ignite that dedication to write every day. If you ask me, that’s the closest we’ve come to achieving any sort of peace in the world. Huge, huge kudos to every single person who, like clockwork, takes it upon themselves to write a poem every day, for NaPoWriMo. (And yes, I include myself in that list, as well.)

But art without its admirers really doesn’t get anywhere. So if you’re reading this, and you’ve made it this far down my blog post, thank you. It means the world to me that someone– anyone, really– is reading any of this. Even if it’s only just one person.

You keep me going.

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That’s it for day 6 out of 30!
Until tomorrow, then?
Cheerio! Xx

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Featured Image by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash