For today’s daily prompt, they played off the promot from a couple of days ago: instead of “hard-boiled similes”, Today, we were challenged to write a poem that contained at least one of a different kind of simile – an epic simile.

Also known as Homeric similes, these are basically extended similes that develop over multiple lines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have mainly been used in epic poems, typically as decorative elements that emphasize the dramatic nature of the subject (see, by way of illustration, this example from Milton’s Paradise Lost).

NaPoWriMo suggested: “But you could write a complete poem that is just one lengthy, epic simile, relying on the surprising comparison of unlike things to carry the poem across. And if you’re feeling especially cheeky, you could even write a poem in which the epic simile spends lines heroically and dramatically describing something that turns out to be quite prosaic.…Happy writing!”

Daylight

As  when the gold light of morning 
dawns like the wind singing like the 
silence of large-hearted friends 
when life sings in dissonance,

so peaceful were the roots shining
through lacy grasses—a picture 
of stability when seismic
shifts start quivering and quaking,

the drooping daisies—fleeting, 
fragile—resting their feet in shards 
of glass scattered by the quake.
What could I do but hold my breath

while the sky exploded in 
burnished orange and lavender?
Soon the yellow stars began to wane 
as my spirit rose with the sun.

—cjpjordan