This past Wednesday, I introduced prose poetry to my teen writers during our club meeting. I love prose poetry, and it’s probably my favorite type of poetry because it mashes the two types of writing into one. I love play on words and internal rhymes and alliteration and just the way the words sound together. So here are a few attempts at prose poetry. I’ve written a few in the past that I personally think are better, so I might have to share those at some point. But here is what I wrote during our club meeting.
“Write”
Paper flutters all around, creating a symphony of sound that echoes in my ears long after the ink has dried dark on the crinkled page. The words peel off the lines and lift me into the air, soaring and sailing across endless blue skies and beyond into the atmosphere of starlight and dreams.
Because writing can take you anywhere. Above, below, inside and out. A journey without a destination. A page without an end.
Yet, I still pick up the pen to begin.
“Fireflies”
Fireflies wish that they were stars, drifting among the endless dark voice, a pinprick of glittery glow against the black. Their bobbing shine could rival the brightest meteor but their wings can only lift them so high in the atmosphere. So they try, each night, to crawl from their homes to catch a glimpse of the universe that goes on forever. A small dot among the night.
“Shades of Blue”
Colors splash in rainbow rivulets down a blank canvas wall. Have you ever stopped to think about the multitude of shades that exist in the universe? To wonder if what you see an sense matches the palette of your best friend or your mom or even your dog? Because in the end, what is blue? The color of the ocean and the sky. The shadow of your newborn nephew’s eyes. The color you see each morning when you wake and look up at the ceiling you painted periwrinkle blue on a whim to give your life a pop of color.
Maybe it’s the taste of ice cream on a day so warm the blue drips down the side of the cone, staining fingers sticky. Maybe it’s the sock you lost in the dryer of your dorm room the semester before graduating. Maybe blue is the feeling of sadness or the calm before the storm or the cool echo of winter’s embrace.
Because what are colors except what help us identify the world around us? To see in technicolor is to feel and to sense and experience life to the fullest. So dab your brush in a galaxy of paint and blend away the black and white of drearier days.
“Alice”
They told me I fell from a tree far above, but I swear that I didn’t just fall. I tumbled, I stumbled, I bumbled my way down a rabbit hole. I floated and fluttered and furniture cluttered me around as I fell out of control. I landed in a place where colors bleed from the sky and animals talk like they’re in school.
There was a hatter and a hare as mad as a spouse, having tea with a tiny doormouse. Then the mushrooms sprouted and stalked, rising in the air, each one as tall as a house.
I didn’t have the chance to finish this one, and I’m not sure how I feel about it since it doesn’t seem to bring anything “new” to the Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland story, other than possibly the beginning where it suggests she’s telling the truth of what happened compared to what people tell her happened. I don’t know. It needs work.
Keeper of the Wood Between Worlds 
Neat! I personally have never really understood prose poetry, I think. I do like free verse poetry, but had a hard time making the jump to prose poetry.
LikeLiked by 1 person