During the month of April, I’m participating in #VerseLove 2025 at http://www.ethicalela.com. Each day, a different host will lead us in a fresh prompt to inspire writing. These prompts can be used in classrooms or for personal writing development. It is my hope that you will visit the site and consider writing and sharing your own poems as we celebrate National Poetry Month together.
Today’s host is Jennifer Jowett of Michigan, who leads us in The Verse Collector prompt. You can read her full prompt inspiring us to write Cento poems here.
For my poem today, I looked no further than my old Childcraft Volume 1: Poems and Rhymes, the book that started my love of poetry as an elementary school child. I sat in a dark closet with a flashlight for hours on end, mesmerized by the reading. Here are some rearranged lines from that volume of poems that I used to create a new poem.
Stolen Childcrafted Secrets
I was going to the window
(to steal the secret of the sun)
too burning and too quick to hold
but something surely to behold
the swallows blow along the sky
the sparrows twitter as they fly
the wind is passing through
I was going to the window
(to steal the secret of the sun)
(hush, I stole them out of the moon!)
I have so much to tell!
Here are the poems from which I took the lines, in order:
Once I Saw a Little Bird, anonymous
This is My Rock – David McCord
The Falling Star – Sara Teasdale
Song of the Wake-Up-World – Countee Cullen
April – Sara Teasdale
Wind Capers – Nancy Byrd Turner
Who Has Seen the Wind? – Christina Rossetti
Repeat 1
Repeat 2
Overheard on a Salt Marsh – Harold Monro (the poem that put a spell on me for life)
March – Emily Dickinson
Common Threads 