Weekly Prompts

Veterans’ Day is our holiday on November 11 to honor those who have served through our military. On this day in 2024, I am posting a poem found in Come before Winter (published 2024) about a college friend who served in the Vietnam War. I have often thought of him, how he awoke at night after his tenure in Nam with nighmares and cold sweats, hollering out into the darkness. This is a poem that honors David while still bringing attention to the horrors of war. I also encourage you to read a favorite poem of mine – “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa  about  a Vietnam vet at the memorial in Washington D.C.,  who experiences once again the war-torn sights and sounds of the jungle that merge into his moment at the wall in D.C.

Prompt: Write  about a particular person who has served our country, a father, grandfather, uncle, son, daughter, husband, wife, even yourself. Perhaps you will choose to write about a particular war.  There are many offshoots to this assignment. As always, take any angle or perspective you choose and honor those in your life who have served our country well.

Summer of ‘69

It was a hum-drum existence, the summer
of ’69. We stood in tiny cubicles eight hours
a day buttoning newly, manufactured shirts,
folding and tucking this way and that, compressing
for packaging and shipping. Day-in, day-out we
stretched and tugged and pulled and pinched to make
garments pucker and wrinkle-free, earning money
for our own bell bottoms, leather vests, tie-dyes,
and class rings. Nothing extraordinary that summer
except Dylan and Joplin, Hendrix and The Doors
and that one day in early June when we rushed
at lunch like the lava at Pompeii to tune the car’s
radio to the local staticky station. We held our breath.
Would your number come up? If so, could you be
deferred? Would you be numbered among the lucky?

I heard after your tour in Nam you continued to battle
the night, writhing, twisting, fetaling into the darkness,
your screams curdling even the stars. And when I learned
of your fateful fall from the rooftop a few years later,
I thought about our mundane lives that summer of ‘69.
How fresh we were, not yet weary with life’s furrows
and folds, its creases, its lines.

Photo: From our Vietnam Intensive Study at George Walton Academy, Jan./Feb. 2018

Prompt:  Write a poem honoring a song or musician or referring to a song or musician.  Here is mine – “Thoughts on Turning Sixty-Eight,” which honors Woody Guthrie, wonderful songwriter who had lots of songs dealing with the Dust Bowl and migrants of the Thirties. Woody and I share the same birthday, July 14. Be sure to check out other poets who pay tribute to some of their favorite music makers and songs.  Here are three more: Faith Shearin’s Blue Elvis, Barbara Crooker’s “Nearing Menapause, I Run Into Elvis at Shoprite, and January O’Neill’s “What’s Love Gto to Do With It..

Thoughts on Turning Sixty-Eight after Reading Guthrie’s 1946 New Year’s Resolutions

You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live. ―Bob Dylan

I’ve loved you for a quarter-century,
you, singing of see-through
tater stew, you, speaking
for the working man and woman,
you, giving us voice and hope in your
three-thousand songs and ballads, you,
who took us riding in your car
and put us on the train bound for glory.

I, who share
your July birthday want to learn your way.
Teach me. Show me how to live, to hobo
across this land of yours and mine, hanging
out under bridges and in tent cities, among people
whose dreams have morphed into nightmares,
with shoeless children, paining for food,
whose eyes have circled and darkened and caved
like sinkholes. Teach me, as John taught you and
as you taught the Boss, to look into kids’ eyes
and see myself. Teach me to stay glad
and dream good and to play good and sing
good and to love. To love everybody.
To wake up everyday and fight. Fight
through injustice and prejudice,
through fires and bad luck, through fate and
tragedy as big as insane asylums, even when
I don’t feel at home in this world anymore.
I am your disciple, Woody, ready
for instruction when you are. Until that time,
|So, long, I’ve got to be driftin’ along.

Published:   Poetry On Line 2021; Photo on Unsplash by Marius Masalar

Write a poem inspired by George Ella Lyon’s poem, “Where I’m From.” When you click the link for the poem, you will find there have been countless others who have written their own poems about the place they are from, their community, the foods, the language, the customs and traditions that make up who they are. After you read her poem, write yours, and if you give it the same title, give her credit with an “after” line following the title. Another poem on this theme is “[I come from a clothesline of shirts]” by Karen Hildebrand, published at Rust and Moth.  Check it out as well.  And finally, check out mine on this website. I wrote it as a high school teacher modeling this same assignment for my students.

Prompt:  Write a poem about a color, but first read Anne Sexton’s “Yellow” (below)  and Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarow.”

Yellow

When they turn the sun
on again I’ll plant children
under it, I’ll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I’ll
take my mother and soap her up, I’ll
take my bones and polish them, I’ll
vacuum up my stale hair, I’ll
pay all my neighbors’ bad debts, I’ll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I’ll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we’ll go on

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 the above links and read and/or listen to the poems. Then write about what the date means to you if you are old enough to remember that tragic day. Or write about another day in history. Some time ago, I wrote on the day JFK was assassinated. I remember being in grade school and hearing the news. I also remember the week-long events associated with the president’s death. How can we forget these monumental days in our lives?

Lamentations Upon the Death of a Nation
—Oh, it’s a fine and useless enterprise trying to fix destiny. – Barbara Kingsolver

I was ten.
The nation had just witnessed a riderless horse, a reversed boot,
a black-veiled widow with her children in blue.
Wide-eyed, we stood at attention
before black and white television images,
but our hearts sagged like London Bridges.
Why has the young and beautiful fallen? And in such a tragic way?
Was this his destiny? Did he sense it?
How about hers? Is it ours, too?
How will the kids spend Christmas? What will Santa gift them?
Will she smile again? Will we?
Why did the light go out at this moment?
Is the new frontier still an option?
Dare we skip rope, play hide and seek?
Will ooo eee, ooo ah ah become a dirge?
Will the nation crumble? How about our world?
Does the man in the moon cry now?
Surely heaven exists. Or is it like Camelot?
The cortege passed. We understood.
We would never be young again unless –
unless Merlin effects a magic spell or
the Round Table dubs another pure of heart
to rekindle the torch, to seek the Holy Grail.

First published in Literary North, 2020
Photo by Robin Jonathan Deutsch

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 at the site, scroll around in the archive for the many fine prompts. Happy writing!

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 read, you might want to write about a favorite memory at the circus or at the county fair. Perhaps you will want to write on your love (or distaste) for clowns or one particular clown, circus clown or otherwise. Note that I used a painting for inspiration. You might wish to do that, as well.

Under the Big Top
—after Marc Chagall’s Circus 1964

In the bed of the ’46 pickup
the family huddles like penguins
for the short distance
to the Greatest Show on Earth.
My face shows Entertainment a stranger in our world.
Already I smell the popcorn, the sawdust.
I feel the rush, imagining
lights and music and flawless feats.

We enter the colorful menagerie.
The big top revealing
first the freak
and then the fat lady
and clowns cutting capers, shooting confetti,
and exotic blankets adorning elephants whose headdresses
and sequined girls dazzle the crowd gone wild.
And the gymnasts with poles sdisplaying
versatility and balance.

We inhale and hold.

Confined to cages just moments ago, lions
now jump through fiery rings.
A trainer in ruffled shirt and white, stained gloves
lifts his baton.
On the drop, horses thunder past, and stunt men, practiced and
controlled, somersult
higher, higher,
on each other’s shoulders.

Hang tight!
Trapeze artists
soar
spin
dive
defying the odds.
No safety net.

And unicyclists
perched three high
hands outstretched
circle—
one, two, three.

The greatest show on Earth,
well-defined and executed
tastes of death.
There’s something—
something primitive about it.

I mean, the ring and all.

Published first in The Ekphrastic Review, Canada.

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, Death”),  popularized in the George Clooney movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Prompt:  Write a poem addressing a person,  perhaps someone from whom you are estranged, maybe a favorite poet, a historical figure, a musician you’ve admired OR write a poem in which you talk to an object, a thing, something you deem useful or something you look at as frivolous or time-wasting or ridiculous – a hair brush, a pair of socks, a pairing knife, your favorite pajamas OR write a poem addressing an abstract quality like loneliness, patriotism, heartbreak, joy.

I wrote an apostrophe to King David, published in my first collection, Strange Fire. Here it is again, with revisions formatted a little differently than the original.

Apostrophe to David

Beautiful boy, we feel your taut, sinewy muscles as you poise
yourself, rock-ready to fell the giant and your nervousness.
We surmise that Goliath, distracted by your fine physique,
lost his life before Philistine hosts, that Bathsheba,
lured by your charisma, like ladybugs drawn to sunshine,
undressed herself on rooftop.  And Saul, who summoned
you to play the harp – did he grow jealous and melancholy
as his eyes met yours?  Even the Almighty fell for you,
handpicking you king, deeming you a man after His own heart.

Oh, mighty one in stone! We’ve defended you as gentle
shepherd, poet-musician, prophet-priest pointing to another
chosen.  Even after relationships as fragile as robin’s eggs,
you were still The David.  Paragon of virtue.  Larger than life.
Of mythic stature.

But is art reality? Beauty, truth?
For when you were stricken with years, you could not
constrain the cold, despite the many blankets.

(Photo of The David by Wu at Unsplash)

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 lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust;
so teach us to number our days,
that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Line 1: A.E. Housman

Line 2:  John N. Morris

Lines 3- 4: William Blake

Line 5:  Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Lines 6-7:  Adrienne Rich

Line 8: William Shakespeare

Lines 9-10:  Psalm 90:12 KJV

Photo by Nataliya Melnychuk on Unsplash

Prompt: The Writer’s Digest defines a cento this way: At it’s most basic level, the cento is a poem comprised of lines and phrases from other previously written poems. Many centos… use the work of multiple poets. But there are some that focus on just one specific poet. 

Write your own cento using lines from other poets or writers or maybe concentrate on lines from one poet. Make sure to credit those poets, as I did in ” A Cento on Living,” first published by the Georgia Poets Society.

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 knocked your socks off?  Is it the monarch butterfly’s migrating pattern, the hummingbird’s pattern of flight? Maybe it’s the bottlenose dolphins, each with its own signature whistle. Write about one or more miracles/mysteries too marvelous to be understood.