W3 Prompt #211: Wea’ve Written Weekly
Intro
Dear friends,
Welcome to our W3 Poetry Prompt, which goes live on Wednesdays at The Skeptic’s Kaddish.
You may click here for a fuller explanation of W3; but here’s the ‘tldr’ version:
Part I
The main ingredient of W3 is a weekly poem written by a Poet of the Week (PoW), which participants read before participating in the prompt.
Part II
The second ingredient is a writing guideline (or two) provided by the PoW. Guidelines may include, but are not limited to: word counts, poetic forms, inclusion of specific words, and use of particular poetic devices.
Part III
After five days, when the prompt closes, the PoW shall select one participant’s poem as the W3 prompt for the following week, and its author becomes the next PoW.
Simple enough, right?
Kindly note: All entries for the W3 poetry prompt must be the original work of the submitting author. AI-generated poetry is not permitted.
Okie dokie ~ Let’s do this thing!
I. The prompt poem:
‘Flood Tide’ by Srijita (Hope)
Ma,
your love
rages loud
through all your loss.
It does not whimper.
It does not hesitate.
How does your heart carry on
knowing the softness it will miss?
Your strength swells, a river in flood tide.
Ma, your love rages loud through all your loss.
II. Hope’s prompt: Be the thing
Write a Dinggedicht: a poem that enters so deeply into a thing that the thing seems to speak for itself through image, texture, movement, and sensation alone.
Choose anything: an object, animal, plant, machine, weather pattern, body part, or natural phenomenon. Describe it from the inside out. Let its physical reality guide the poem: its weight, surface, rhythm, sounds, habits, decay, memory.
You may lean into the surreal. Let the thing dream, contradict itself, remember what it should not remember, or behave in ways that defy logic. But keep the poem grounded in the thing’s material presence. The strangeness should emerge naturally from the object itself, not feel imposed upon it.
Do not explain what the thing symbolizes. Let the thing be the meaning.
Guidelines
- Stay rooted in concrete imagery and sensory detail
- Avoid abstract explanation whenever possible
- Surreal elements are welcome if they grow organically from the thing itself
- Free verse or rhyme are both welcome
- 10–20 lines
Tips
- Try not to name the thing’s symbolic meaning directly; let the reader discover it through the experience of the poem
- For an example of the form, see Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther”
III. Submit: Click on ‘Mister Linky’ below
In order to participate and share a poem, open up this blog post, outside of the WordPress reader. At the bottom, just below these words, you will see a small rectangular graphic with the words ‘Mr Linky’. Click on that to submit.
Submissions are open for 5 days, until Monday, May 18, 10:00 AM (GMT+2)
Last week’s W3 poem
This week’s W3 prompt poem (above), composed by Hope, was written in response to last week’s W3 prompt poem, which Dawn wrote:
‘Breath of Life’ by Dawn Minott
New life begins in Aerocene
Where gravity loosens its grip
Humans unlearn the weight of stay
No ownership, only orbit
No engines, only breath
Lungs, rivers, wings
Everything inhales, exhales together
There are no borders here
Equity and equality quells
The hands that clenched too tightly
Nothing is taken
Because nothing is kept
Everything passed
Warm, bright, alive
Humans no longer extract,
But at one with nature
Maps dissolve
Humanity move as shifting kinships
Connecting as one breath
History is a shed skin
#Community #CreativeWriting #Description #Dinggedicht #Imagery #Poem #Poetry #Prompt #Senses #W3
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