Category Archives: Challenges and Writing Prompts

My Love, The Sea

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My Love, The Sea

A love like hers is rare and true
When first we met, I was a youth
She moves me every time she speaks
her voice is strong; her thoughts are deep

And when she holds me in her arms
I’m overcome by all her charms
I love her kisses salty sweet
In waves she sweeps me off my feet

Teeming with life, ebbing, flowing
Her swelling, swirling, tempest showing
She takes my shallow breath away
Sink or swim with her I’ll stay

She calls to us from terra’s brink
You may just know my love I think
And even heard her siren song
From over horizon’s edge…beyond

~kat

This is take two for the Day 10 challenge for NaPoWriMo 2023. I had finally completed a proper chantey of several verses and lovely rhymes, and when I tried to copy it, I forgot I was not on my laptop and with one click found myself staring at a “C” …poem gone forever! I hate when that happens. At any rate, I’m tired and it’s been a long stressful day. But I do love the sea. It’s been too long since I dipped my toes in the ocean. I miss her. Sometimes when the winds are strong whipping through the tree leaves it sounds like the ocean crashing into the shore. I close my eyes, imagine the sea, and console myself in those moments.


one-sided

one-sided 

you don’t hear me when I say I love you
I’m paying for the demons of your past
after all these years, still you have to ask
you can’t believe I’ll stay forever true

I wonder if there’s more that I can do
to prove my love, or would it be a waste
it’s exhausting when my effort is misplaced
it’s worth reminding you what we’ve been through

we’ve seen it all, the better and the worst
sickness, yours and mine, and family too
adversity, met head on, we two pulled through
if I had to choose, you know I’d pick you first

so tell me darling dear, do you love me
please spare me all this effort, set me free

~kat

I am not a fan of sonnets. But a challenge is a challenge. Chewed on this all day. Obligatory sonnet penned. Glad this is done. 


NaPoWriMo2023 Challenge Day Nine: Sunday Sonnet - write your own sonnet. Incorporate tradition as much or as little as you like – while keeping in general to the theme of “love.”

In general, though, here are the main characteristics that define most sonnets:
* Number of Lines: 14
* Meter: Typically iambic pentameter
* Rhyme Scheme: Petrarchan (abba abba cde cde or abba abba cdc dcd) or Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg), among many others
* Unique Qualities: Contains a volta (twist or turn) closer to the end of the sonnet
* Common Themes: Typically love and romance but also faith, time, personal emotions, and social/political matters

clean up needed on aisle 5

clean up needed on aisle 5

my mind is a junk drawer
it gets me nowhere
you know, I feel everything
I think you see what I’m saying,
Judy, at the Dollar General checkout
I’m going home now
but not before I check the clearance aisle
like I need more crap in my downsized life
i just might be a closeted hoarder
I’m just kidding (but you’re thinking I’m not)
the crazy rant of lunacy
and a smile that hides sadness
I’ll have you know that I have overcome every adversity, untouched
she’s super woman, mistress of her universe
they will remember that when I’m gone
such brilliant fool
who believed she could have it all and died trying
c'est la vie
“You know you don’t need us,”said the junk on aisle 5
have a nice day Judy, keep the change

~kat

Well…today’s challenge was a bear! (See what I did there? 😊). And it took a very dark turn before I knew what was happening! That said, I feel I must make the following disclaimer …the reference to first person in this poem is a purely fictional representation prompted by the weird list of prompts below…haha! I am definitely not a hoarder, closeted or otherwise, I am certainly no Wonder Woman and I am most definitely a bit “touched”, as they say, by life! So glad we cleared that up from the git-go! 🤪

NaPoWriMo 2023 Challenge – Day Eight: And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:

1.  Begin the poem with a metaphor.

2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.

3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.

4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).

5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.

6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.

7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.

8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.

9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.

10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).

11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”

12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.

13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”

14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.

15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.

16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.

17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.

18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.

19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).

20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.


poison

poison

perfect, lifeless boys
in the sunshine
dead or dying
in this new battlefield
in schoolhouses
here, where guns
are business,
this country
where we dare not want
or mention the poison
claiming them
in such great numbers

too long in this season
is blinding us to what we love

~kat

NaPoWriMo2023 Challenge Day 6: off topic today. Just could wrap my brain around the ask. Soooo….It’s been a while since I wrote a blackout poem. I found this stunning poem by Molly McCully Brown. The title grabbed me right away because I live in Virginia. Her words resonated with me and my own experience here. My take after gleaning from her words resulted in another poem right from the current headlines. I wish it wasn’t 😟
Virginia, Autumn
by Molly McCully Brown


October, I’m dragging the dog away from perfect birds
lifeless on the pavement. By the water, boy in dress blues
with bayonets, the blistered hulls of boxships. Everything
is sunshine. Everything is dead, or dying, and this isn’t
a new thought. I grew up here, but farther from the ocean.
Each April, they took us to the battlefield, marched us
in schoolhouse lines up courthouse steps: here
is where the war ended. Never mind that it was fall
before the final battleship lowered its flag; never mind
that we still haven’t fired the last gun. What business
do I have wanting a baby here: in this body
where I can’t keep my balance, this country
where we can’t keep anything alive that needs us,
or dares not to, not even the switchgrass
pale and starved for groundwater? And still,
I do want. I search the news for mention of the birds,
whatever poison or disease I’m sure is claiming them
in such great numbers
: meadowlarks, house wrens,
chickadees, starlings. Once even a gray gull, pulled
open at the chest before we found him, hollowed
of his organs. It takes a long time—too long
for me to understand the sun in this season
is blinding, and the birds are flying into windows
all around me, fourteen stories up. Flying into glass
and falling. What we love is rarely blameless.
Is it a failure that I wouldn’t trade this brightness?
I imagine pointing upward for my daughter:
Look, there, how it catches in the changing trees.

Copyright © 2023 by Molly McCully Brown. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 5, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.


poetic justice

poetic justice

there once was a shyster named Don
a scammer in chief, a vile con
to court he was dragged
by a porn star he shagged
how climactic, his just denouement!

~kat

A limerick today…straight from the headlines! You can’t make this stuff up! I shouldn’t be enjoying this, but I am. I can’t look away. Not sure I captured the theme…but the past few years have been over the top inappropriate. Hoping this brings a little levity to this absurd train wreck!

NaPoWriMo 2023 Challenge Day 5: write a poem in which laughter comes at what might otherwise seem an inappropriate moment – or one that the poem invites the reader to think of as inappropriate.