Yearly Writing Prompt

CaptureSeeing Google congratulate me on my (purported) birthday gave me quite the startle. Not that I have a birthday: that I forgot that Google Knows All (even if the date it chose wasn’t quite right due to my obfuscation). However, it brings up a thought on writing: prompts. There are prompt generators [1][2][3] to help, but I’ve got two dates that I’ve used, more or less regularly, as starters for poems. Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday commemorating the ‘sealing of the judgement’ of a person for the coming year), and my birthday.

The former invites reflective meditation. Frequently the subject is personal, based on my experiences that year. The latter is a poem, with the number of syllables equal to my age that year, and functions as a sort of momento mori for my life to that point. I’ve some really good ones and many that stretch and strain to syllable count instead of content.

But there they are: days for reflection based on a habit of {shudder} decades at this point.

Have you prompts? Please share!