The prompt is to feature a subject that is identified with a character from myth or legend.
It had been a long day at school,
Lessons dragged and were boring,
Lunch had lumpy gravy
And cold custard on dry chocolate pudding.
So walking home along the shore
She was glad to feel the salt air
And hear the waves.
She was different, she knew it,
And so did the selkies . . .
The prompt is to use one of a list of ten words from Taylor Swift's recent album.
Cardigan.
Knitting is the art of joining holes together
Using wool, and knitting needles.
When I was a child my mother,
My aunt, and my great-aunt,
All knitted cardigans for me;
So that I was kept warm by a collection
Of holes surrounded by coloured wool.
The prompt is to write a sijo.
With soft footsteps you came to me
and joined me for the breaking dawn,
Your presence welcomed this new day
and told of promised joys to come,
You lay beside me, soft and still,
a cat awaiting breakfast time!
The prompt is to write an American sonnet.
It appears that someone has dumped an unwanted item
And instead of taking it to the actual dump
They have dumped it in a public location where it might
Accidentally encourage someone else to take a dump.
It would seem that someone has ceased to require
A toilet seat and instead of disposing of it
Sensibly and in the accustomed fashion
At a place where such things can be deposited
They have dumped it in a public place that
Has required significant effort to transport
Said toilet seat and where the toilet seat
Has no natural affinity with its surroundings.
Instead of dumping it take it to the dump
And thus hopefully avoid someone taking a dump!
The prompt is to use alliteration, consonance and assonance.
As evening falls I gaze across the Flow
And see the sunlit sky reflected far below.
A rare time this, with barely any wind,
A setting sun, and curlew's calls to find
The memories of a soft spring changing day.
Sun-warm, rain-washed, and not yet May.
The prompt is one question from a Proust Questionnaire.
"What is your greatest regret?"
Are regrets great or
Are they really annoying
Trivial hiccups?
The prompt is to start with a line from a poem.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
However hard you try to avoid them.
They in turn had parental influences
From an earlier and less tolerant age.
Or was it, was it really less tolerant,
Or was it simply different?
The prompt is a poem about a super-hero.
The alarm goes off whilst it is still dark,
But its strident tones remind you that
Someone somewhere needs you.
Your coffee is half drunk, but with
One eye on the clock and one hand
Grabbing stuff you leave.
You leap into your vehicle and speed
Along dark and just-waking streets
Until you reach . . .
The hospital, and start another long
And weary day as a nurse.
The prompt is a fight between two disparate objects.
The human wanted to type a document
And even hoped to print it.
The human was firm in its intent
And was determined with it.
The desktop felt rather neglected
And was angry with the printer.
The desktop did not feel protected
And was rather keen to hinder . . .
The human who just wanted to type
And print this short piece of writing,
But instead of success language was ripe
And the two of them fell to fighting.
The computer just froze
And would not respond
To the human's desired prose
Or any attempts of its hand!
The human cursed, and the human swore,
And the human fell to despairing,
Until the human could simply take it no more
And, with frustration and anger forbearing . . .
The human turned the power off at the wall!
The prompt is to focus on a single colour.
The world is grey, said the photographer,
As he loaded a new roll of black and white film
Into his camera.
All the colours are condensed into an infinite
Spectrum of grey, he said, pointing to the myriad
Of greys in the forest.
White is the lightest grey, he said, and of course
Black is the darkest grey, and silver is grey
And the sea shines silver.
Colour is just a filter, he said, that covers the essential
Greyness of all things, and we should always try
To remove the filter.
He took twenty-five shots, then went home to
His darkroom where he worked with a red light
To produce mono prints.
Then he pinned his prints to an orange string
And hung them against a pink wall,
Sat in his blue jeans and turquoise t-shirt
Drinking tea from his lime green mug
Whilst he looked at his day's work.
The prompt is an historical event.
Stone quarried, pier,
One day cars started driving
On and off the boat
The prompt is to write about something or someone that haunts you and then change haunt to hunt.
mOnStEr
They told him a story about a monster with five legs and three eyes,
A monster that lurks under beds and haunts (hunts) little boy dreams.
They told how the monster demanded a child as sacrifice,
And how it haunted (hunted) with howling and screams.
The listed each brave young person who was willing to fight,
And who fought to the death and changed into a ghost,
They listed each princess, each servant, each knight,
And debated which ghost might then haunt (hunt) him the most.
Finally the boy stayed awake one long night
And waited until all the adults fell to slumber
Then he hoisted his torch and with a searching spotlight
Crawled to the bed and then slowly crawled under . . .
Next morning the adults found the bed empty
No sign of the boy, shook their heads with regret
And said he must have been tempted,
That's another one lost to a fairytale pet.
And a long way away, in another land,
All the lost children danced, hand in hand.
The prompt requires the subject to want to be something or someone else.
Confuse . . .
Confused, a small child
Wonders why they fail to please,
Getting nothing right.
A teenager, lost
In a world of confusion
Does not really fit.
An adult, life is
Confusing and unhappy,
It is still all wrong.
And always the thought that if only this,
And if only that, then it might all have been
Okay, and life might have been a bliss -
Ful romantic concluding film scene.
Perhaps they are not who they think they are?
The prompt is a poem inspired by a piece of music.
Homeward Bound.
I have sat in so many railway stations
And bought so many tickets.
I have travelled in cars with cassette players
And 'mix tapes' of whatever the driver fancies
But in my own car, no, I have albums.
At one time copies on tape, later on cd,
Now on a SD card and set to shuffle.
None of them have the impact of
The Simon and Garfunkel song the first year
I spent in the Lakes.
Any song from them takes me back instantly
To hot days at Scout Crag, and long lunches in the pub,
To journeys over mountain passes, and bank holidays
With too many people in one place, cars parked
Along the road and blocking gates, litter dropped
And the local farmer dredging the septic tanks
And spraying the contents on his fields . . .
Pretty pale pink and blue fragments fluttering
In the breeze and the sewage-smelling-wind bringing
The message of wrongly flushed sanitary towels
On display in broad daylight.
The soundtrack of my mistakes, and all my words
Come back to me in shades of mediocrity,
Harmonising their emptiness and I feel
A longing for someone to comfort me.
The prompt is an unexpectedly abstract ending.
The sea, burnished steel,
Diamond star sparkles, blue sky,
The news is of war.
The prompt is a stamp.
Little packets . . .
When I was a child of no more than nine or ten
There was a trend for collecting stamps.
Albums might be loose-leaf or then again
A soft-backed book, a diary with ramps
Made of bent sticky stuff to secure
The stamps in sets on pages.
If I was good, according to mother, I might
Be taken to the corner shop, and there
In a dark corner on a nicked card, held tight
Were little packs of stamps to keep or share.
For me the name of Magyar held allure
A timeless foreign land so gracious.
Other stamps were brighter, rarer, bigger
But Magyar stamps held me in wondering thrall,
A price that made no sense that I could figure
And letters that were the strangest thing of all.
As I aged into my teens this magic spell endured,
I no longer collected, but Magyar still engages.
The prompt is anaphora.
Another Orkney Anthem.
Still the wind tugs and tosses the grass back and forth,
Still the waves carry words and tales from the north.
Still the rain patterns windows with mysterious words
Still in runes long forgotten in these harsh modern worlds.
Still the dusk creeps its fingery shadows long and long
Still the seals in the night share their ghostly sad song.
Still the cold of the spring says that winter has won
Still the heralds of summer are born in by the sun.
Still this land that is history, that is sea, sand and stone
Still this land gives a birth to blood, flesh and bone.
(c)2ndwitch
The prompt is to take ten words (five senses, three nouns and two verbs) and write in some form of rhyme.
Gazing to the far distant hills,
And tasting air like wine,
Feeling the winter wind chills
As shivers run down my spine.
The curlew's plaintive call,
And the scent of tangled tide,
I pause to embrace it all,
And stow the memory deep inside.
Blissful solitude, a storm's central eye
To gird me 'gainst the city's anguished cry.
(gazing, tasting, shovers, call, scent, curlew, tide, city, embrace, stow)
The prompt is a tall tale.
the people went to the polls
and elected the politicians
who then did what they promised
and the people who voted
found themselves happier
and with a secure life to live
aye right!
The prompt is monostich.
Each wave meets the shore and retreats.
There is no need to worry as it changes nothing.
The chair is a memory of the man who sat there.
The radio interferes with a conversation without taking part.
There is a window that might be closed or open.
The prompt is to take inspiration from someone on a website called 'Yesterday's Print'.
You will rise if you are waiting
For a bus that never comes.
You will rise if you are hungry
For carrots and uncooked peas.
You will rise if you have an itch
On your back that you cannot reach.
You will rise if you are hearing
A bell sound where there is no tower.
You will rise if you are suffering
With cold feet and fingers.
You will rise even if there is no reason
Because it is in you to always rise.
(c)2ndwitch
The prompt is an ode to something everyday.
within you sleek and shiny body
you contain the power to control
my comings and goings
if you choose not to work
you can reduce me to despair
and utter desperation
your superpowers are legion
and without them life
would barely be worth
living, my kettle!
The prompt is a meeting or encounter that should not have happened.
Is there an opposite to serendipity?
They told me you had left, moved on,
And thus there was no chance we could meet.
The memories between us had gone,
Buried and erased by stamping feet
And curse words, I had no desire
To revisit times now long, long past
But there you were, a flat tyre
Halting your journey, the die had been cast
And we had to meet that one last time.
To kill you would be a crime.
Would'nt it?
(c)2ndwitch, 08/04/24
The prompt is 'wish you were here', postcard style.
I wish you were here . . .
I wish you were here with me,
Now, today, sharing the wind
And blustering sea.
I wish I could share with you
The washing on the line,
And the island view.
(c) 2ndwitch (I do not usually offer a dedication but I dedicate this short poem to Cookiepuss.)
The prompt is to write a poem rooted in 'weird wisdom'.
I put my keys on the table . . .
They cannot breathe.
They do not sleep.
But they talk.
They do not eat.
They do not drink.
But they speak to me.
There is reality
And there is life
In inanimate objects;
And they can move
Without being physically active,
And they can act with malice
Without having a brain.
Inanimate objects may be politicians.
(c)2ndwitch
The prompt is to consider how two or three things would look at something.
Cluck.
It is time to eat.
I am hungry.
I get the small frying pan
Out of the cupboard
And turn on the ring.
Butter sizzles,
Toast toasts,
and I scramble.
Yum.
It is time to eat.
I have barely lived.
What is that pan?
Why is it somewhere hot?
Why am being hit with a knife?
Why am . . .
(c)2ndwitch, 04/04/24
The prompt is to take inspiration from a book called The Strangest Things in the World.
The Complex Spider's Web.
it is well known that spiders make webs
and that they spin the gossamer threads
into a spiralised net to entrap flies
and keep them there until dead
but we should not just look at the web
but at what it might symbolise
in the way its threads interweave
to entrap the fly until it dies
but is it the web that is complex
or the spider that weaves its trap
and that reads the vibrations
as a single use auditory map?
(c) 2ndwitch, 04/04/24
Today the prompt is a surreal prose poem.
Swartmill.
The sea, a swirling cacophony of grey and green, writhes beneath the steel grey sky and calls, seductively to the birds that circle ceaselessly above it, crying and screaming of last years triumphs or perhaps of fish that once caught escaped and became eels that then wriggled and wiggled their way into the land round the loch, became wormified and worried, dodging fleecy feet that stamp and stomp on rain sodden ground until a man stops and smiles, watching the silent and invisible upheaval.
(c)2ndwitch, 03/04/24
The prompt is an unusual love song.
Ambrosia.
You have always been there for me,
From my earliest years
You appeared and I was glad.
You came camping and hiking with me,
When as a teen my walking gear
Helped me, weather-well-clad.
You joined me in the joy of delivery
Of children, comforted my fears
And were constant when life seemed mad.
You stood beside my misery,
And helped to halt my tears
When life seemed black, ever sad.
You are my waking cup of tea,
The mug of joy that always cheers
And is the best drink I have ever had.
(c)2ndwitch, 02/04/24
The prompt is to recount an old story from memory.
That Portrait . . .
An old life, lived young,
Desolation, an industrial world,
Fighting to escape,
Sex, and friendships.
A young man, an old world,
Exploited for the rich
By the downtrodden.
Love, lust, and hatred.
(c)2ndwitch, 01/04/24
