2025 April PAD Challenge: Day 29
On Day 29 of the 2025 April Poem-A-Day Challenge, writers are challenged with the fifth (and final) Two-for-Tuesday prompt of the month.
Before we get into today's prompt(s), I just wanted to give another quick update on the 2024 November PAD Chapbook Challenge results. I'm almost there and blocking out time today to finish it up; so I'm hoping to make the announcement this afternoon/evening and link to the results in tomorrow's final prompt for April. I'm so sorry for the delay; it wasn't intentional. On to the poetry!
It's time for the fifth (and final) Two-for-Tuesday prompt:
- Write a "near the end" poem and/or...
- Write a "near the beginning" poem.
Are we near the end of writing poems or near the beginning of revising them? I don't know.
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 Near the End and/or Near the Beginning Poem:
“The Start of the End,” by Robert Lee Brewer
The end is never as close as it feels
when we begin to prepare ourselves
for what we know must happen next;
we feel ourselves beginning to grieve
before the night covers us in a fog
of nostalgia and neglect for ourselves
twisting in the echo chamber of
impending despair; we're never there
fully, because the end stretches out
beyond what seems reasonable,
but it's just enough to prepare us,
in our broken ways, to start again.
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.
