#napowrimo #poetry
Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.
Happy writing!
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
As a child I could always be found
Curled up in a corner, reading a book.
I adored travelling to another world
in the supreme imagination of my mind.
It helped me write " compositions"
at school, I learned the art of stories.
Words danced in and out of my head.
Forming poems on my blank pages.
Storytelling led on to problem solving,
having good ideas and the confidence
to implement them; I loved to read
throughout my life and to write.
I wrote letters to foreign penpals, to
friends and family and to my boyfriend
who became my lover and then spouse.
It was a shame he was such a louse!
Childhood reading led to a lifelong
passion for reading and writing which
has led to me being a published and performance poet in my crone years.
©🦊VixenOfVerse, 2026
VIXEN of VERSE 