PAD Day 30: Made it Again!

I can't believe that April's over already. I'm pretty happy with my production this month - depending on how I count them, I've written at least 41 poems this month (46, if you count all the two-line landays and four-line clerihews separately).  As usual, the results varied - I hope there are at least a few contenders for the daily prize of publication in the next edition of Poem Your Heart Out.  On some days writing was easy, and on others, a struggle, but I did write at least one poem for every day in April, and that feels great, especially after a few months of inactivity and "you-call-yourself-a-poet?" self-doubts.

Today's final prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a poem with the title "Bury ________", and
(2) Write a poem "backwards". By this, Maureen Thorson means to start with the last line of a poem and write it, working your way up to the first line; or you can take a poem you already wrote, reverse the order of the lines, and tweak them to make them more cohesive and coherent. I didn't mash up the prompts today, even though it might have been possible, so here's my "Bury" poem:

And here's my "backwards" poem, a rewrite of my Day 4 poem, "Domestic Departures". I thought it was a good choice because of the speaker's ambivalence in the original poem, and also the last line of the original suggests a certain cyclical nature to this relationship.

Domestic Arrivals

So everyone who leaves comes back again -

I walk through the arrivals to make sure.

And as your plane lands, I think that I might

feel I need you. You wrote now and then,

we parted friends, but I wished it was more.

I see you coming - what a lovely sight.

I have a soft spot underneath my smirks

for you.  I thought again - this is no game

inside my chest - there is a burning flame,

and yes, I think the sentimental lurks.

When you left, I felt like such a jerk,

my dry-eyed goodbye later felt so lame,

and it's my fervent hope you feel the same.

I swore I wouldn't but - look, waterworks.

I hope you all had a swell National Poetry Month!