Write a poem every day of April with the 2020 April Poem-A-Day Challenge. Write a six words poem.
For today’s prompt, write a poem that uses the following six words:bump, embrace, fixture, howl, lonely, resolve
How did I come up with this list? Actually, it’s a tie-in to our Shakespeare Week that starts today, because the Bard is actually credited with inventing all six of these words. Pretty cool, eh? For sestina fans, I kind of intentionally made it six words for a reason. So let’s get writing!
(33 lamentable words coined by William Shakespeare.)
Remember: These prompts are just springboards; you have the freedom to jump in any direction you want. In other words, it’s more important to write a new poem than to stick to the prompt. — Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest
six words
I remember believing
the struggles brought on
by your depression and anxiety
were, while serious,
just a bump we would have to get over
in raising you
to the happy and successful adulthood you would have.
To the life you would embrace
when you could leave behind the petty pedantry
of compulsory education
and learn what you wanted to learn
and do what you wanted to do
create what you wanted to create
beholden to no one.
But the dark clouds
became a fixture
and your increasing discomfort
a howl, as they blocked out the moon
until there was no light at all
and you, lonely in the blackness
lost hope
even as we
with parental resolve unrelenting
and a love beyond explanation
tried to reach you.
Our every effort still failed
to illuminate the solitary place
in which you found yourself trapped.
In the end it didn’t matter what I believed,
what I still believe:
that you would somehow have found comfort
and ease
and satisfaction,
a life worth living,
if you could have held on.
When I read Robert Lee Brewer’s initial direction of writing a six-words poem, at first I thought of the idea of six-word stories. This poem was going to be pretty fast and easy (and short)! But then I clicked through and read the real instructions. Hmmm, it would likely be much harder than I thought.
After I worked the first two words into the poem, and realized they were in the order presented, I challenged myself to include the other four words also sequentially — not a requirement, but something I wanted to see if I could do.
The title, six words, obviously refers to the prompt. But I’ve also included my six-word story as the last line.
