2025 April PAD Challenge: Day 17
On day 17 of the 2025 April Poem-A-Day Challenge, writers are prompted to write a city poem (even if they’re from a small town).
Before we get into today's poem, I do want to let the patient participants from the 2024 November PAD Chapbook Challenge know that I'm getting close to announcing the results of that. I always seem to be overly optimistic on timelines, but I think it should be sometime in the next week. So keep an eye out.
For today's prompt, write a city poem. The poem can take place in a big city, medium-sized city, smaller city. Heck, towns, villages, hamlets, etc., all work as well. Ghost towns? Why not! I'm not going to break out a census on your poeming. Just write!
Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.
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Write a poem every single day of the year with Robert Lee Brewer's Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming. After sharing more than a thousand prompts and prompting thousands of poems for more than a decade, Brewer picked 365 of his favorite poetry prompts here.
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Here’s my attempt at a City Poem:
“Cincinnati,” by Robert Lee Brewer
I ran into the electric night
surrounded by sounds humming
always without a person in sight
and cut through the park darkness
following the sound of my
own breathing and followed
close by the echo of my own
footfalls causing me to speed up
because I never look back and
imagine I'm being chased through
these city streets reflecting street
lights and random cars passing
on their late-night errands as I
make it to an overlook beneath
a full moon swallowed by its
own halo and I take a moment
to stop and contemplate what it
all--everything--means and where
I sit in the grand scheme of this
expanding universe that produces
minor miracles every single day
before I take one last deep breath
and run myself back home.
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
