1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

What If This Road

What if this road, that has held no surprises 
these many years, decided not to go 
home after all; what if it could turn 
left or right with no more ado 
than a kite-tail? What if it’s tarry skin 
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth, 
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes 
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down 
in a new way; around a blind corner, 
across hills you must climb without knowing 
what’s on the other side; who would not hanker 
to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know 
a story’s end, or where a road will go?

—Sheenagh Pugh
https://sheenagh.webs.com
https://sheenagh.wixsite.com/sheenaghpugh

Please join Writing From The Inside Out by attending the read-around sessions on Friday afternoons. It’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional. If you have not registered, click the button below; and if you have registered, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Note: Next Read Around is:
May 14,, 2021 at 4:00 PM PST

Special Access Link for May 7 and My 14 only: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83125922228

My Thoughts

I remember moments in my routine life, when my work would require a drive to another city, and, on occasion, when I hit the road, I would have this uncanny urge to just drive on, to drive away from my life, to drive towards some unknown destination. It was not that my life was bad or that I needed an escape, it was more like a mythic call to adventure. I was too responsible and lacked the courage to follow that inclination. But the urge remained and, to a certain degree, remains to this day. Sheenagh Pugh’s poem, What If This Road, captures that call beautifully: that hankering urge for freedom, that desire to turn the blind corner, climb across hills without knowing what’s on the other side, that wish to be in childlike wonder and wander through a world gracious in its newness and never ending in its delight to our senses.

Prompt Menu

  1. Recall a time when you were truly surprised by someone or something in life and write a poem about it; or compose a poem about your relationship with the experience of being surprised (do you like or dislike surprises?).

  2. Consider some routine pattern, such as a route you might’ve take to work in prepandemic times or a standard way you go through your grocery store. Write a poem about this pattern. You could take the reader/listener through the experience with you. What happens if you write the experience as a journey, or a treasure hunt, or some other metaphor?

  3. Describe a pattern or a habit as a landscape and compose a poem about the shape of it.

  4. Compose a poem about the experience of a blind corner or of a hill that crosses into the unknown. Build up the moment of being at the point of wonder about the unknown and all the feelings and thoughts you have at the moment.

  5. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of being absorbed in a good book, feeling compelled to continue reading toward the end and wanting the story to go on and on. Where might that kind of experience apply in your life?

  6. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you from the poem or from life.