2025 April PAD Challenge: Day 18
For Day 18 of the 2025 April Poem-A-Day Challenge, poets (and other ne’er-do-wells) are tasked with writing a response poem.
For today's prompt, write a response poem. In many ways, every poem is a response poem as it's a response to something, even if it's that hard-to-explain sense of inspiration many poets feel. For the purposes of this prompt, your poem could respond to a story in the news (or just a fictional story, for that matter), a conversation you overheard in public (also called eavesdropping), or another poem (written by you or another poet).
Of course, this is where I need to remind everyone to poem respectfully with each other.
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 Response Poem:
“Regarding the World,” by Robert Lee Brewer
Every day, it feels, there is something new
to provoke consternation and outrage,
and yet, I also find myself staring
out my window at the birds and the bees,
at deer crossing hesitantly before
bounding across the street full of courage,
and yes, I still feel my outrage daring
me to speak up, double-dog daring me
to forgo peace for giving voice to truth,
because it's true some truths can't be ignored,
and I know there is no one perfect way
to both stir the heart and then save the day,
but we need to live and love and believe
in the beauty of a world in relief.
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.
