A Space for Practicing Poets
Designed with WordPress
As we near April 30th and the imminent conclusion to this year’s poem-a-day prompt, I can’t help but to think about endings.
For today’s prompt, make a list of endings from your life.
Your list could include things like the end of a day, or of the night, the end of a job, the end of a movie, the end of a pet’s tail, or any other creative interpretation you have for the concept of “endings.”
Chose an ending from your list that speaks to you right now—one that you feel would be fruitful for writing.
What would your inner young person rather be doing today?
Gosh. The choices are endless as they are individual.
For today’s poem, create a world for your inner child or teen to inhabit. What does it look like? Include sights, sounds, scents, texture, even taste in your descriptive treatment.
Feel free to use flashbacks, and language typical for the age group.
Here are a few poems to inspire:
“Directions Back to Childhood” by Judith Waller Carroll
“Elegy with Ice Cream” by Kathy Nelson
“When I Got My Ears Pierced” by Sophie Cohen
“On the Eve of Roberto Clemente’s Third Miracle” by Michael Brockley
Birds, I mean.
Yep. They show up in poems all the time.
Sometimes they are even the sole focus of entire collections and anthologies. This truth makes it challenging to write about birds in a way that feels original and surprising.
Doesn’t mean you can’t do it.
Write a poem that uses birds as its subject or as its image and metaphor. And–you guessed it–make it original and surprising.
This is a great opportunity to play with paradoxes and analogies.
Here are poems from Zingara Poetry Review for inspiration:
“Blackbird” by Yvette R. Murray
Use your memories, expertise, and personal knowledge around and about a specific musical artist, band, event, concert, or performance to create a vivid poem about the encounter.
While words cannot actually recreate an event, your poem should aim to render an immersive experience for the reader.
This is a great opportunity to incorporate onomatopoeia.
Poems for inspiration:
“Living in Opryland” by Javy Awan
“Let it go on and on” by Kenneth Pobo
“Reverend Billy’s Boogie Woogie and Mom’s Gulbranson by Gianna Russo
How do you…
Write a poem with a particular audience in mind using an instruction manual format and tone for guidance. Feel free to use any of the suggestions listed or invent one of your own, or explore a topic you have been mulling over recently.
As an extra challenge, use the instruction manual form to provide direction on how to handle something abstract in a concrete way.
Feel free to include a few imperative sentences and an oxymoron or two.
Here are a couple of “How to” poems from Zingara Poetry Review for inspiration:
“How to Baptize a Child in Philadelphia, PA” by Mike Zimmerman
Apple, the round fruit of a tree of the rose family, which typically has thin red or green skin and crisp flesh, is an image most people encounter on a regular basis, maybe even daily (as in one a day keeps the doctor away).
Beyond the dictionary definition and familiar idioms that feature the apple as its main image are the many connotations, some as well-known as the garden of Eden, others more nuanced and personal.
What are your associations with the apple?
Today’s prompt asks you to write a poem using the apple in a surprising and unexpected way. Perhaps you begin with a cliche and turn it on its head or maybe your poem begins very far away from the apple image then finds its way back.
Whether you “lean in” or obfuscate, here are a few poems for inspiration.
Consider character traits and habits you have inherited, genetic or modeled. As you do so, make two lists. One for “positive traits and habits” you have inherited and feel grateful for having, the second for “negative traits and habits” that you could live without. These lists will be the basis for a poem that explores both positive and negative personality traits and habits.
When composing your poems, consider addressing family members by name or relationship who exhibit these traits or habits and passed them on to you; let them know how you feel about inheriting said traits.
You can use such verbiage as “You are responsible” or “I hold you accountable for” for the traits you could live without and “I am thankful/grateful for” for the traits you’re rather glad you have.
As an extra challenge, include and explore at least one trait for which you are both dismayed and glad to have.
Use the Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the thing with feathers,” included below, as the main focus for a free writing exercise (writing without lifting your pencil or stopping to make corrections to grammar, spelling, capitalization, or punctuation, for a set period of time). Aim for 20 minute of continuous writing.
If helpful, you can center your freewrite on a specific image or line from the poem or expand on the larger abstract idea of hope itself.
Write quickly without overthinking, but keep your writing legible too (if handwriting).
The goal is to capture your inspired ideas as they arise. If the first few minutes are awkward, that’s okay. The good stuff is usually buried underneath those initial, oftan banal thoughts and concerns. Write PAST the “crap.”
After a day or so, return to your free-write and use it as basis for a new poem.
For today’s prompt, write a poem inspired by one (or more) of these quotes about time. Feel free to use the quote as an epigraph for your poem.
“The past is now part of my future. The present is well out hand” Ian Curtis
“The timeless present is not merely a moment in time, but a quality of awareness that transcends time itself. It is the realization that the moment is, in fact, the only reality we directly experience.” ~Everyday Buddhism
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ~William Faulkner
“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorn
“Time does not pass, it continues.” ~Marty Rubin
“Arboreal-time is cyclical, recurrent, perennial; the past and the future breathe within this moment, and the present does not necessarily flow in one direction; instead it draws circles within circles, like the rings you find when you cut us down.” ~Elif Shafak
Use the following nouns and verbs in a poem (you can use all or some, but aim for at least five words from each list:
If this particular group of words don’t spark your creativity, try one of several “random word” generators available on the internet to produce different set.
Just search “random word generator” or even “random noun generator” or “random verb generator” to find one you’d like to try.
Each zodiac sign is ruled by an element: fire, earth, air, or water, and each element is characterized by an individual’s strengths and tendencies.
But how each star sign is affected by its element is unique to that sign, and your horoscope describes or predicts what may happen to you based on the position of the stars and planets at the time of your birth.
For today’s prompt, write a poem based on your horoscope for the day, week, month or year, or one based your zodiac sign’s personality traits.
You can opt to use your sign according to the 12 month horoscope associated with Western traditions, or the lunar horoscope associated with the Eastern.
To discover your Eastern sign, consult this (or another) Chinese Zodiac Calculator
For profiles and horoscopes based on the 12-month zodiac, consult Horoscope.com for inspiration, but you should absolutely choose a horoscope source that you like best.
Just a quick note to thank everyone for participating in the 2025 Zingara Project Poem-A-Day challenge.
I’ve received much encouragement in your emails and appreciation for the prompts, and I’ve really enjoyed reconnecting with all of you.
Below is a list of prompts posted so far this month for anyone wishing to take another look and for those who didn’t get a chance to see them the first time around. With each prompt, I include poems published on Zingara Poetry Review that I believe serve as apt examples or as inspiration, so check the list for your name.
You can join in anytime and write poems to as many or as few prompts as you like. April too busy? Write your poems in May and beyond.
Tuesday, April 1
Journal Mining Prompt
“How I Arrived Here” by Karen Neuberg
Wednesday, April 2
Protection Prompt“
“Protection” by F.I. Goldhaber
Thursday, April 3
Beginnings Prompt
Friday, April 4
Whispers of Work: A Lament for Extinct Professions
“Barnwork We Didn’t Talk Much About” by Charles A. Swanson
“Stay at Home Mom” by Sabina M. Säfsten
Saturday, April 5
Absences Unfolded
“What We Leave Behind” by Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb
“Song of Sorrow” by Jeremy Garnett
“My Sister’s Baby Blanket” by Alejandro Lucero
“Absence by Inference” by Duane L. Herrmann
Sunday, April 6
Transformation
“The Ugliest Girl in Christendom Goes to the Gynecologist” by Camille-Yvette Welsch
“Ugliness came up” by Kitty Jospé
“City of Bread” by Marc Janssen
Monday, April 7
Humor in Public Spaces
“Permanence” by Denise Duhamel Dance in a Drugstore by Anne Whitehouse
Tuesday, April 8
Utterance
“Ambidextrous” by Denise Low
Wednesday, April 9
Contradictions
“What is Lost is Not Lost” by Peter Mladinic
Thursday, April 10
Game On
Friday, April 11
Collect, Remix, Repeat
Saturday, April 12
Prose
Things to Be Grateful for During the American Winter by Michael Brockley
Sunday, April 13
What You Leave Behind
Monday, April 14
The Thin Veil
“Where the Dead Go” by Denise Low
“Do the Dead See?” by John Brugaletta
“Alternate Life Number Two” by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri
Tuesday, April 15
Eyesore
“Ugliness Came Up” by Kitty Jospé,
Wednesday, April 16
Apocryphal
“The Parable of the Mustard Seed, the Chanteuse and Wild Rice” by Libby Bernardine
“In My Story” by Chella Courington
“My Stepmother, Having Returned to This Earth, Becomes Hannya” by Tara McDaniel
Submissions for poems written from these prompts open on June 1
