WRITING EXERCISE #83
Today, one of my toddler daughters had the end of a stick in her mouth. I said, “Stop eating that stick! We don’t eat sticks, silly!” and my 4-year old daughter said, “Yeah, Lulu. If you eat sticks, you will get old.”
So let’s riff off that. Write a poem built out of four (or however many) cinquains that tell the story of someone getting old. Make sure one of the things that made them old was something they ate. Something they saw. Something they heard. Something they felt. A fragrance. Have the first line be the person’s name. If you want each cinquain to be about a different person, cool. Oh, and if you forgot what a cinquain was, here’s the format:
line 1 – 2 syllables
line 2 – 4 syllables
line 3 – 6 syllables
line 4 – 8 syllables
line 5 – 2 syllables
Drury Lane
Name here,
Sign here, sigh there,
Wear and tear of the town,
causes tearing of hair, baby
cries —
–closed eyes.
Lullabies sung,
Tumbling now
that standing up has come,
Standing on your own two cold feet,
good bye —
–I smell,
the Muffin Man,
hungry as I run to
Drury Lane, a girl or
a boy or something else holds me,
my body,
isn’t what it
was, I can’t run,
but I can sleep now forever,
with
closed eyes.
This was written as part of National Novel Writing Month 2017, [Day 2, Writing Prompt #83]
