2026 National Poetry Month, Day 19 "Swim"

NPM 2026, Day 19 "Swim"

"Remember the fish, when we went snorkeling, how we just floated there, you and me and the angel fish." --Kitt in Home for the Holidays

Hope you find the prompt inspirational and celebratory. Feel free to create and share an original poem. Or tell an anecdote. Find a connection with an existing poem you know and share that. Or post a link to music, film, essay, book.

Or, just relax, view these images, and meditate a few minutes. Dive. Swim. Float.

NPM 2026, Day 19 "Swim" Source and info

Jack Wong illustrator https://jackwong.ca/
Jack Wong (Canadian illustrator and writer), illustrated the National Poetry Month 2024 poster, he also has written a children's book When You Can Swim, 2023 winner of multiple awards.

Mark Farrar photographer https://www.mattfarrarimage.com/night-swimmers
Mark Farrar (American photographer) lives in the San Francisco Bay area, California.
https://www.saatchiart.com/farrar

Peter Hurd painter https://www.hurdgallery.com/purchase-prints/the-oasis-detailed-version
Peter Hurd (American, 1904-1984 ) The Oasis, 1945, egg tempera on panel, 47 in x 47 in. Located in the permanent collection of the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM. The museum, founded with the assistance of FDR's Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1937, is projected to be closed until 2027 after 2024's catastrophic 500-year flood where the water reached up to 5 feet within the museum.

Harry Benson photographer https://www.harrybenson.com
Harry Benson (Scottish, 1902-) Greta Garbo, 1976, Antigua. Garbo was 71 at the time of this paparazzi-like shot. She had been retired from films since 1941, never married, had no children. She maintained a private existence for the last 50 years of her life.

Toni Frissell photographer https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/the-works-of-photographer-toni-frissel...
Toni Frissell (American, 1907–1988) fashion photographer and then volunteered her photographic services to the American Red Cross, Women's Army Corps, and Eighth Army Air Force during WWII. More of her WWII photos here: https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/toni-frissell

Just here thinking about "swim" and what comes to mind.

Sink or swim
Just keep swimming, just keep swimming
Swim with the sharks
Be in the swim
Swimming with the fishes
Swimming against the tide
Swimming with the current
Makes my head swim
Swimming in the deep end

But what really comes to my mind, is the pleasure of swimming.

Swimming on a hot summer day
Horseplay while in the water
Swimming underwater and the silence there
The sensation of feeling buoyed, less gravity's pull
Skinny dipping!
Lounging around a pool all day, sunbathing.
How different it is to swim in a pool, a lake, a river, the sea.
How much swimming was part of youth, as was learning to swim

This was an experiment, written a while back, not great but I kept it because it was hard, ha.

My first challenge to myself was to write a sestina (Matt @hamlet61 introduced me to the difficult form). Second, take up a challenge on the twin group, The Poetry Collective on Goodreads, where we imaginarily "traded" real things--I took the "green sweater that smelled of Amber" which I assumed is a perfume. I worked on this poem so long, never really satisfied. I can only hope it is still a sestina!

We Couldn't Swim

Lonesome in my closet hangs a light green
sweater, a cardigan once worn by a slip of a girl
who meant the world to me, Amber.
She still lives fresh and golden
dancing in a certain field of wild
dandelions near a pond, just like love.

Though we didn't call it love.
We were only growing, tender green.
How often our mothers warned us against being wild,
going near the pond, each forbade her girl.
We two knew only it was a world of summer and golden.
So we planned a ruse, me and Amber.

Oh wait, let me tell you about freckled Amber.
She was untamable, a fox, clever paired with love.
Unkempt hair, frizzy, reddish golden,
Laughing eyes in speckly green.
Disguised as an 11 year old girl,
a master liar she garnered our freedom to the pond's wild.

Who was I? A worshipper of that unfettered wild,
a bug buzzing in the scented hair of Amber.
I was the awkward twin, a girl
only made beautiful near her rampant love,
she, the fair one in variegated green.
One night together we stole through lies, perfectly golden.

At the pond, the sun, like a ball, dropped its golden
weight into black. Amber stripping, dared me, "Let's go wild!"
Her pale silhouette slid into sickly water, darker than darkest green.
Exactly three splashes heard. I could see nothing. I wailed "Amber! Amber!"
Pond, trees, stars all dumb, silent to screams of love.
My legs immovable, shook by the dry sweater of the gone girl.

Afternoon's headline was Found Dead Drowned Nude Girl
with a black and white photo, no, her hair should be red and golden!
Nothing good written or said except the mother's love,
Lamenting how today's freedoms made girls unnatural, wild.
Disobedient girl will always stay home now, precious Amber.
Disobedient girl, I would never let go the sweater ever green.

In deepest folds, scents of my first love,
though I didn't know love, being just a girl.

My heart, now grown slimy moss green
still tangles in waves of crests once golden.

The two still wild
girls, unbeautifully hardened in amber.

I'm especially taken with the rift between what presumably the public felt (anonymous girl drowned, sad, probably shouldn't have been out swimming at night, what were her parents thinking) and what the narrator felt (sadness too, of course, heartbreaking, but also that this outcome is so unjust for what Amber was doing, nothing at all about she shouldn't have been out swimming at night, and of course knowing exactly what her parents were thinking).

>5 elenchus: Thanks for the comment, E. Have you run across a sestina before? What a crazy form it is. Instead of me writing this poem, I felt like the sestina wrote it. The other sestinas I've read (a total of 3, I think) all seem to take a path into strange lamentations.

I am unfamiliar with the sestina and had to look it up: whacky! -- but so intriguing in that rotation of the same six words as the end words to each line. The repetition was noticeable to me on reading your poem, even without knowing to look for it, but subtle that I would not have been able to say what I was hearing. Having it pointed out, I can see the repetition helps give the impression of a theme. So interesting, and now I'm curious as to how it ever came to be.

>7 elenchus: Read a couple others, if you are interested. GOOD ones, ha. The one I found by Elizabeth Bishop didn't sound strained. https://staff.washington.edu/rmcnamar/383/bishop.html
Matt's was very good too! https://www.librarything.com/topic/378176#9130579

The W. H. Auden I didn't "get" (requires some study, then I'm sure it would be brilliant). Here it is recited by Alec Guinness with text below it in the description box. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw9xVUQMEKU

And a plethora of them on Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/categories/sestina

Lastly I'm now reading the Poetry Foundation's Why Write Sestinas? Very funny! But informative. "Sestinas are delusional, but hopeful." ha ha ha! I need to read it again before I (ever) (ever) attempt another.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/67724/why-write-sestinas

Hey @hamlet61, we are talking about sestinas...what do you think of that?