Writing Prompts: Transformation & Shapeshifting

2D Animation by Hanna Judd

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Writing Prompt #1

 

1. Write a poem about metamorphosis and/or about “shapeshifting.”
2. Write a poem about being born.
3. Hone in on a specific phrase, and write a poem in response to it.

Writing Prompt #2

Listen to Liz Berry's enchanted reading of BIRD here.

BIRD
by Liz Berry

When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could stop me.
               The air feathered
                                                as I knelt
by my open window for the charm –
                                              black on gold,
                                          last star of the dawn.
Singing, they came:    
                              throstles, jenny wrens,
jack squalors swinging their anchors through the clouds.
                   My heart beat like a wing.
I shed my nightdress to the drowning arms of the dark,
my shoes to the sun’s widening mouth.
                                      Bared,
   I found my bones hollowing to slender pipes,
            my shoulder blades tufting down.
                  I   spread    my flight-greedy arms
to watch my fingers jewelling like ten hummingbirds,
my feet callousing to knuckly claws.
              As my lips calcified to a hooked kiss     
silence
               then an exultation of larks filled the clouds
and, in my mother’s voice, chorused:
         Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the Winter.
So I left girlhood behind me like a blue egg
                                                        and stepped off
                                 from the window ledge.
How light I was 
as they lifted me up from Wren’s Nest
bore me over the edgelands of concrete and coal.
I saw my grandmother waving up from her fode,
                                looped
      the infant school and factory,
                       let the zephrs carry me       out to the coast.
Lunars I flew
                         battered and tuneless
       the storms turned me insideout like a fury,
there wasn’t one small part of my body didn’t blart.
Until I felt it at last          the rush of squall thrilling my wing
                    and I knew my voice
was no longer words but song       black upon black.
I raised my throat to the wind
                                        and this is what I sang . . .

Note:
Black Country : Standard
charm : birdsong or dawn chorus        
jack squalor : swallow     
fode : yard
blart: cry

From Black Country (Chatto & Windus, 2014), first
published in The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls (Tall Lighthouse, 2010), Liz Berry 2010.

1. Write a poem about an animal, mythical metamorphosis you’d like to occupy, or a thing you could change into. What is the charm that grants the change? Show, don’t tell in your detail.
2. Write a poem about taking flight.
3. Hone in on a specific phrase, and write a poem in response to it.

 

Something Extra

BECOMING BIRD
By Bob Hicok

It began with a tattoo gun to his back.
Face down, he sniffed the skin of dead men
on an execution table the artist bought
from a guard who pinched it from the trash

at Jacksons' Prison. It was to be one feather
outside each scapula, an idea
that arrived while he flipped Art
Through the Ages past the slide view

of Kristos Boy, who without arms and confined
to the appetite of marble, still seemed
poised for air, to lift through the roof
of the Acropolis Museum into the polluted sky

of Athens, bound for translucence. But healed,
turning left, right in a sandwich of mirrors,
​the lonely feathers asked to be plucked,
the black ink grew from the root of dusk

to charcoal tip, they'd have fluttered
if wind arrived, reflex to join the rush,
but alone seemed less symbolic than forgotten.
So he returned to the Cunning Needle,

to Martha of pierced tongue and navel, said
wings and she slapped the table, added
coverts and scapulars, secondaries
and tertials, for a year needles chewed

his skin closer to hawk, to dove, injected
acrylic through tiny pearls of blood.
Then with a back that belonged to the sky
he couldn't stop, sprouted feathers

to collarline, down thighs, past knees
and his feet became scaled, claws gripped
the tops of his toes, she turned him over
for the fine work of down, he laid arms

on the syringe–wings of the table,
a model of crucifixion dreaming flight
through the pricks. So now, by day's end
he can barely hold back the confidence

of his wings. At home, naked with eyes
closed, he feels wind as music
and dreams his body toward a mouse
skimming the woven grass, not considering

but inhabiting the attack, falling hard
as hunger teasing the reach of land,
while from the ink of the first tattoo
a real feather grows, useless but patient.

"Becoming Bird" copyright ©2000 by Bob Hicok. The poem first appeared in Quarterly West #51, 2000

SOURCE: https://endicottstudio.typepad.com/poetrylist/becoming-bird-by-bob-hicok.html