Writing prompt #2

Poetry Wales will be posting weekly/fortnightly prompts for its new competition Wales Poetry Award. Prompts are not mandatory nor required for submission, but intended as inspiration for new writing. Wales Poetry Award is open to international contemporary poetry and closes for submissions 28 November 2019. Click for more information.

Writing prompt #2: Write a poem about building.

Whether to shelter the needy, to manifest an identity, to develop relationships or to make an empire, building (and destruction) is the creative impulse made present. Write a poem about building.

Example from Sarah Kelly’s ‘Moat’, published in PW issue 54.3 and one of Poetry Wales’s top 10 poems

Moat

by Sarah Kelly

place around everything a
line. Lines social or scented, historic
& laden, we’ll chew your specks to
a castle shaped mess

The sand can scribe and
guard, all our exits stand
waiting and steady

This is real land, real stakes,
real hearts
the risk of it.
And as daughters you
repeat, they become
your repeat, resplendent.

This is real land, real stakes,
real sink, the risk,
the moat, all heart.

‘Moat’ first appeared in Poetry Wales Volume 54 Number 3. Sarah Elisa Kelly is a poet and artist currently completing a TECHNE funded PhD at the Royal College of Art. Her poetry publications include the chapbooks locklines and Ways of Describing Cuts both with KFS press and anthologies Better than Language (Ganzfeld) and Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe). She was 2015 poet in resident at the university of Loughborough and a recipient of a Stationers Fund award and Francis Mathew Scholarship alongside several residency and development grants. She lives and works in London.