Happy NaPoWriMo! (Day 1, Belated)

Okay, I have been in a major creative funk since my last post.  I've written maybe five or six poems since my productive weekend at the Winter Getaway in January.  And I found myself trying to beg out of this year's National Poetry Writing Month Poem-a-Day Challenge, saying that I have way too much to do, like taxes, redecorating and re-organizing to get ready for a major party at my house, plus all the usual stuff.  But you know, my muse could use a good ass-kicking, so I'm going to try to write a poem a day anyway.  Hopefully I'll be able to stay with it, and they won't be all crap.  I'm also going to try what I did last April: combine the prompts from Robert Brewer's Poetic Asides blog with the ones from the NaPoWriMo blog.  So here are the prompts from Day 1: Write a poem about an arrival, and write a poem that uses the first line from another famous poem.  I picked one of the four examples suggested on the NaPoWriMo blog, from a poem by Walter de la Mare:

Moonchild

Slowly, silently, now the moon
slides on its arc from behind the trees,
huge at first, or so it seems
so close to the ground, but then
with evening’s deepening dome,
it climbs to its place amid the stars.
Higher and brighter, it tugs at us
with fullness and shadow-casting light.
Cycles reach their peak now –
tides pull closer to the shore,
our bodies respond with madness
and the flow of our own blood.
Each full moon pulls you closer, too,
first-born grandchild, moonchild,
growing ready to arrive at solstice,
the moon’s shortest night,
when all the forces of nature
will converge at once.