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[TD1]

April is National Poetry Writing Month, and over its duration the Young Poets Network is giving daily writing prompts. For many of us, time is no longer a constraint. We are in our homes, separated from family and friends. I say that the internal world can be as rich as the external, and challenge you to prove me right.

I will (hopefully) be posting a daily poem here. You are welcome to join in; encouraged, in fact. The YPN's first prompt is:

Fool's gold, gooseberry fool, or a fool and his money...

Write a fool-featuring poem for April fool's day.

The second is:

Write a recipe or a menu poem

I hope to post one for each today, having started a day late!

[TD1]

The Flower Fool


The queen, face stony like a bedless lake
Sits dressed in colours pleated by a maid
To look like someone’s Icarus,
        feminine in her fall.
The court is loud but not for such as she
Who sits beside a balding king.

It is the fool’s fate to juggle state
While speaking words with velvet tongue.
He’d hoped to see the north
Where plains held without reins
Called him.
They laughed a crown of three straight peaks
Onto his head instead.

The king quaffed, slapped his lady’s knee, and cried
“Fool, fool us with your wit, if such it be
I wish to hear philosophy.”
“Dry as the whiskers on a three-crown cat
Is wisdom strained through absent heads,” he said.
“Dedicate yourself instead.”

        “To what,”
the chortling king replies.

“To flowers drinking sun so they grow bright
And bees together gather burnished amber
Or, if you prefer
To minstrels singing sea-like into shells
Of how a woman’s love and belly swells."

The king’s great whiskers whisk his ale
        laughing
While the fool stands aware with words
Which only he may speak.