Prompts

Today is the anniversary of 9-11. Lots of important poems have been written about this day, including Lucille Clifton’s “September Suite” poems written the week of the tragedy,  Billy Collins’ “Names” and  “Photograph from September 11” by Wislawa Szymborska. Click on…

Go to Poets Online – September, 2024 edition – to see the prompt on “the last time,” based on a George Bilgere poem. (I am a BIG fan of Bilgere.) You can read my poem, “You’re Still the One” near the bottom of the page. While…

Prompt: I just learned that the first week in August is International Clown Week. Upon learning that, I thought of a piece I wrote a few years back that appears in my first collection, Strange Fire. It is a memory of my family going to the circus in the 50s. After you…

An apostrophe is a direct address to something inanimate, someone not living. Think of scripture when the psalmist talks to death and the grave:  O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (1 Cor. 15) or the Ralph Stanley song  (“O,…

A Cento on Living We are dust and dreams; we live in what kills us. We are put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love, to leave tracks. Somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die— golden…

Truly we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. Prompt: Mysteries and miracles are all around us. .In fact, Oliver admonishes  us to pay attention, to be astonished. What have you paid attention to lately that has astonished you, has awed you., has…

Here is a work in progress, an “after” poem that originates from a prompt from Diane Seuss, chancellor at Academy of American Poets and also connects to a Kahlo painting. Get Seuss’s prompt dealing with a repeated word and advocating for lots of…

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. – Darl in As I Lay Dying Prompt: What does home look like for you? Is it a country? A room? A particular house? Perhaps it is people. A relationship. Maybe it’s the hereafter. When you…

–July Fourth, 2023  Smack-dab in the middle of our neighborhood the love of the town and his caregiver dancing to the band’s rendition of Led Zeppelin’s Communication Breakdown, their sweating  bodies sparkling with every move; golf carts garbed in American…

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.                                                                                                                                                                                                                               …