NaPoWriMo Does It Again, or, April 2024: A Poet’s Odyssey

Let us go back in the Wayback Machine, for exactly one week:

So, somewhat against my best judgement (that is, things can pall if they become too routine — but then one can always quit early and who else will know?) I accepted a dare to myself and “joined” NaPoWriMo, the write-a-poem-from-a-daily-prompt challenge for National Poetry Month, a.k.a. April. But the NaPo guys had to know better for April 8, at least for a broad swath of states from Texas to Maine, where there was to be a total solar eclipse.

Thus, for April 8, a prompting for poems of doomed love, of the breakup of couples, on a day when the sun and moon . . . well, of a union that did not last long.  Did one sense a subject?

And so for today, as said a week later, the subject matter is stamp collecting or, rather, unusual stamps. Or, well let’s let the NaPo guys say it themselves:  Take a look at @StampsBot, and become inspired by the wide, wonderful, and sometimes wacky world of postage stamps. For example, while it certainly makes sense that China would issue a stamp featuring a panda, it’s less clear to us why the Isle of Man should feel the need to honor 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in stamp form. From Romanian mushrooms to Sudanese weavers to the Marshall Islands getting far too excited over personal computing, stamps are a quasi-lyrical, quasi-bizarre look into what different cultures (or at least their postal authorities) hold dear.

The Isle of Man? The Manx?  Does one once more sense something obvious (hint: it’s not cats with no tails, though they can be included)?  So:

THE ISLE OF MAN
(” it’s less clear to us why the Isle of Man should feel the need to honor 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in stamp form” — NaPoWriMo prompt. 4-15-24)

The Isle of Man honors
2001, the Space Odyssey film,
but is that, then, so odd?
Is not the home of us all, the Earth,
an island of man;
and is not our collective journey
around the sun,
and with that star to who knows where,
an odyssey that would top any other
our minds can conceive?