Forty Poetry or Journaling Prompts

Forty Poetry Prompts

 

 

Here are 40 ideas for writing a poem, or as a prompt for a personal essay.  If you want to make it a funny poem, try using rhyme.  If you get stuck on a rhyming word use the following link as your on line rhyming dictionary:  http://www.rhymezone.com/

 

Write about...

 

1.     being underwater

2.     a person whose life you're curious about

3.     your mother's perfume

4.     trouble sleeping or waking up

5.     growing older

6.     the feeling of getting lost in a book

7.     telling someone, like a grandchild, how to know when you're in love

8.     a bad dream

9.     tell a ghost story or something about the occult. Even if you don’t believe                    in that stuff it can be fiction.

10. your mother’s whistling.

11. an important life choice you've made

12. spring, summer, fall, or winter

13. something most people see as ugly but which you see as beautiful

14. a n emotion that you have struggled with, such as jealousy, or worry

15. becoming a parent, or a grandparent, or a great grandparent

16. an event that changed you

17. a place you visited -- how you imagined it beforehand, and what it was actually like

18. the ocean, or huge storm from your childhood

19. forgetting [i.e. does it get scary when you first notice you are forgetting stuff a lot?]

20. the speed of light

21. someone with a skill: doll maker, weaver, painter, et cetera.

22. reflections in a window

23. a newspaper headline recently or one important one from you past

24. holding your breath

25. a specific color

26. your greatest fear

27. time travel and how or why you would travel to a particular time and place

28. a particular toy you had as a child

29. being invisible, maybe it is just people not seeing you for some reason when you are clearly right there in front of them.

30. a time you felt homesick

31. telling someone about something that is hard to tell

32. about birthdays [i.e. birthday candles: how they matter to children who get few of them, and they don’t matter at all old people who get a whole bunch of them.

33. a favorite food and a specific memory of eating it

34. an imaginary city

35. losing your ability to sing, or giving up driving

36. imagine life in an aquarium

37. pick a Bible verse and tell how it give insight into something that happened to you.

38. write about falling two ways:  a physical fall, and something that was a downfall

39. what a computer might daydream about

40. your grandmother's hands