creativeI am participating in National Poetry Writing Month, where the goal is to write one poem a day for 30 days. During the month of April, I will be using the writing prompts at ReadWritePoem.org and posting the results.
Day two prompt
It’s day two of NaPoWriMo, and we’re feeling fresh, invigorated, ready for anything, right? Here’s today’s challenge: find five verbs and five nouns from one subject area, and use them to write about another subject. My son had this assignment in his college poetry class, and he culled his words from biology and then wrote about technology. The idea is to create an extended metaphor in a short poem, of maybe ten to twelve lines.
The Film Student Without His Camera
He zooms in
on his music, hand tapping
a meter, a soft boom, boom, boom.
Skateboard tilts against his leg. He
fingers his nose ring,
an edit his Mom
panned. But he'd just cut
a sweet face and crooned "Hello
Dolly," for his music-loving mama.
Now, he peers through a gray-
filmed window on the El, captures
the world through his blinking lens.
I chose the film industry. My verbs were: 1. edit, 2. pan, 3. tilt; 4. zoom, 5. cut. My nouns were: 1. film, 2. lens, 3. dolly, 4. boom, 5. meter. The young guy is someone I saw on the El, who got on in the University City district.
Moral:
It's fun to imagine the lives of strangers.
