Writing Prompts: Knowing & Imagining #2

BTW, I need a CREATE button.

This week's focus is to develop poetic imagination. When we don't have direct experience to guide us, we always have our imagination as a bridge to the knowledge. The challenge is to imagine what you can't know, mixing the ordinary with the fantastic.

First Mentor Poem

Source: Poetry 180, Library of Congress

Poem Prompt #1

• Write a new poem in response to whatever speaks to you from this poem—whatever has energy or resonance.
• Or, write a poem about your observations of strangers in public places – real or imagined.  What do they need? What do they give? Write for 10 minutes. Ready? Go!

​

Second Mentor Poem

Academy of American Poets · Ama Codjoe: "Hunger"

​Hunger
AMA CODJOE
 
When I rose into the cradle
of my mother’s mind, she was but
a girl, fighting her sisters
over a flimsy doll. It’s easy
to forget how noiseless I could be
spying from behind my mother’s eyes
as her mother, bulging with a baby,
a real-life Tiny Tears, eclipsed
the doorway with a moon. We all
fell silent. My mother soothed the torn
rag against her chest and caressed
its stringy hair. Even before the divergence
of girl from woman, woman from mother,
I was there: quiet as a vein, quick
as hot, brimming tears. In the decades
before my birthday, years before
my mother’s first blood, I was already
prized. Hers was a hunger
that mattered, though sometimes
she forgot and I dreamed the dream
of orange trees then startled awake
days or hours later. I could’ve been
almost anyone. Before I was a daughter,
I was a son, honeycomb clenching
the O of my mouth. I was a mother--
my own—nursing a beginning.
​
Source: Poets.org
​

Poem Prompt #2

• Imagine your inception. Imagine yourself in womb. Imagine your birth. Write the poem. 
• Imagine your parents “desire” or imagine your own. Write the poem. 
  
• Write for 12 minutes. Ready? Go!

More, Please

Midnight Office 
BY CYNTHIA CRUZ

​The child is not dead.
She is sleeping.
 
Gone from this world
Which is broken.
 
The angel of Michael
Outside the garden
His circle of fire
Maddening around the tree.
 
He put the word
Back into her:
A heavy kind of music.
 
Then she was free.
As we all are.
 
All night I stood in the icy wind,
Praying for the storm to destroy me.
 
But the wind blew through me
Like I was a hologram.
 
If you say I am a mystic,
Then fine: I’m a mystic.
 
The trees are not trees, anyway.
 
Source: Poetry Foundation

​