Hello all! It’s Day 17 of NaPoWriMo.
NaPoWriMo: April is National Poetry Writing Month!
It’s also Easter Sunday, and Passover occurred this weekend, too. Many people are in a religious frame of mind. Now, whether or not you celebrate either of these holidays is not necessarily pertinent to this very brief writing prompt, but it could be a good basis of inspiration.
This is similar to Day 1’s prompt, which was Rita Dove’s Ten-Minute Spill. If you recall, she gave us eight words and asked us to come up with a poem in an incredibly short amount of time.
Well, here let’s double that amount of time. Let’s take twenty minutes.
And much like her prompt, let’s draw from a common set of ideas or themes. In regards to the religious nature of the holiday, let’s use some of those images, too.
- cave
- doorstep
- grass
- lamb (or sheep)
- blood (or paint, or wine)
- egg
- wind
- water
- stone (or rock, or boulder)
- butter (or cream, or milk)
- bloom (or flower)
I admit: I included butter because I’m intrigued by butter lambs.
Some of these words can function as verbs as well as nouns. Some are generic themes of newly burgeoning spring, while others relate directly to the religious symbolism of the holidays. Feel free to use them in any fashion, spiritual or secular, naturalistic or imagistic.
So: Twenty minutes, at least five of the above words, in at least ten lines.
Happy writing! Regular installments of writing prompts will resume tomorrow.
➡ IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM:
- National Poetry Writing Month: an invitation | NaPoWriMo: a short exercise
- NaPoWriMo, Day 2: Telling a Secret | NaPoWriMo, Day 3: Still Life
- NaPoWriMo, Day 4: One out of many | NaPoWriMo, Day 5: Hanging together
- NaPoWriMo, Day 6: Home and introspection | NaPoWriMo, Day 7: Like this or that...
- NaPoWriMo, Day 8: No more short shrift | NaPoWriMo, Day 9: Poem as voicebox
- NaPoWriMo, Day 10: Caught between the horns
- NaPoWriMo, Day 11: Living in the spaces in-between
- NaPoWriMo, Day 12: What’s the occasion?
- NaPoWriMo, Day 13: They say it’s all about timing | NaPoWriMo, Day 14: Mad Libs
- NaPoWriMo, Day 15: The bizarro world next door
- NaPoWriMo, Day 16: Now hiring