This is a journal prompt to share with someone. Each person picks 5 words (any five words; snatch the first five than come to mind) and gives these words to their partner. The partner must then write a poem that includes all five words.
This is a great exercise in being spontaneously creative; it's also incredibly human, since you're given 5 random words and challenged to make sense of them all together. What is more human than encountering many different experiences and bits of information and having to fit them into a coherent story?
Here are the words I chose for my mom:
Element
Poppy
Ensconced
Ease
Trust
Here's the poem she wrote:
Poppy is a man I know.
Richard is his given name
which I always called by- by the way-
until realizing that only
family
called him Poppy.
And I was invited.
Element of trust
ensconced by family
ease of familiarity.
Poppy.
Here are the words my mom gave me:
Hypothetical
Crossword
Pinecone
Hummingbird
Love
My partner poem:
Crosswords of thought wind through the air,
unspoken hypotheticals intersecting.
Amid all the sweet din of life,
this family
is a hummingbird blur, the daughters
going but always zipping back,
coming home,
girl tree-seeds with the sense to return.
Home:
A love cone, a parent pinecone
that always has space
for the life it created.
A non-blurred, non-hummingbird photo of the wonderful family that my poem is about:
