A Poem and a 2-Line Poetry Prompt
What will you write?
This week I hit “yes I will attend” on a Meet Up poetry group’s weekly Zoom Call meeting. The description on the event page said to choose one of three poetry prompts. Being the overachiever that I am, (or chronic over-YES-ing addict, you decide), I did all three. This is my poem response to the first prompt:
Framing your poem. Select one of the following pairs of sentences. Free-write by adding images, characters, ideas to these sentences. The sentences can appear anywhere in your future poem: beginning, middle, end, even back-to-back.
Prompt 1
Begin your poem with this sentence:
Even though we’re walking down the same road and it comes out the same place, we’ll never walk….the same road.
End your poem with this sentence:
And when I came home physically, I was searching for deeper paths of return. — Meet Up group directions
Given the language of these sentences is so far out of my poetic voice, I found this to be a rather challenging prompt. I am not sure if I will leave the poem in its original version or later edit out the prompt and allow the poem to take on its own creative direction, but I thought I’d share my response and invite you to write your own, if you like. Here is my poem:
Unfinished Business
Even though we’re walking down this same road and it comes out the same
place, we’ll never walk ….the same road bends in places altogether new for the both of us.
Though your hand is in mine, in the three-fingered crooked way that is ours, there are parts of you that linger behind, settling with the pebbles that shift in our wake.
I always thought we’d get to the end of the road, not the end of everything between us.
There were to be papers to sign when one of us lingered in those last breaths.
There were to be family members to call, hymns to choose, arrangements of flowers and choosing just which tree under which one of us would take our place in the soil.
But you have chosen differently, I think now, as the winter slips between my fingers. Josie pulls the leash and I know it is time to go. This road is long and her feet have gotten cold.
I came this way before, you know; leaves in all the places where your footprints used to be.
I thought to laugh and turned to speak, but you were miles and miles from the road you’d promised.
And when I came home physically, I was searching for deeper paths of return.
Poetry prompts are a very healthy exercise for poets to do. They dislodged us from creative style and form ruts that we tend to fall into with our poems. It is so easy to get into that space where all of our work begins looking and sounding the same. For the poet, practice is just as important as it is for the athlete, the public speaker, the surgeon. Practice may not necessarily make perfect, but it will challenge your creative voice to speak in new and compelling ways.