If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 4/24/25 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  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

  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

My Thoughts

We do not know what we carry inside housed in the antique shop of memory. Trinkets and trivia on dusty shelves, baseball cards, a broken robot, a bag of cat-eyed marbles, monster mash on 45,  a box of browning photos, a catalogue of petty crimes, birthday parties, first dates, impossible dilemmas, fears of the wild lurking outside, etc. I lived 18 years in our childhood home before it was sold. I remember how ready I was to leave it all behind, even though that cul-de-sac of 17 houses was a safe haven, a tiny neighbourhood with its own mix of fun and friends, of worldly troubles and tragedies. I had already walked away from Sunset, thrown my cap in the air, tossed my yearbook in the hauling. I was already forging a life of walking ahead, never needing to burn my one-way bridges once I crossed  them. But the memories came tumbling back while reading Adele Kenny’s, Anything With Wings. A childhood house almost always has the stamp of home even if it was riddled with troubles. I could relate to Kenny’s never-look-back attitude while the poem acknowldges there may well be lingering phantoms and apparitions forever wandering “the lost road home.” How many of us could be the child inside the past that believed in “anything with wings,” desperately wanting to fly away, and also be the adult perpetually trying to find the way home. 

Anything With Wings

The day I sold our family house, I closed
and locked the door and walked away. Never
curious to see what the new owner would do
with the only home of my childhood. I have no idea
what happened to it, no idea if anything was left
in some dark corner or on the hidden staircase
closed off in the emptiness of my mother‘s closet.

That life, as I knew it, was gone years before I
let it go–-a stippled history of secrets and sadness–
dreams that lingered, but couldn’t come true.
As a child inside that past, I believed in anything
with wings–-haloed angels, birds with feathers like
crested sunlight, and moths that fluttered dust
on my hands when I touch them.

In the woods across the street (by the pond where
wild ducks came each autumn), my cousin Eddie
found a space where starlight sifted through
darkness and traced our faces–-a quarter moon
cloud-ribbed high above the trees. We didn’t know
how time would change us, if anything might remain
the same-–the essence of us still there; phantoms
of the old house, apparitions in whatever is left
of the forest, forever wandering the lost road home.

—Adele Kenny (from What The House Knows)
https://www.adelekenny.com

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write poem about a moment or event that clearly marked leaving behind your childhood home. There may be several markers, moving out, clearing out your own things at a later point, driving by it, sale of the property, etc.

  2. Use your childhood home as your prompt and write whatever comes to mind about it. If you lived in multiple homes as a child, write about the difference between them and what changed in you with each one.

  3. Journal or write a list poem about what might have been left in your childhood home (things, emotions, aspects of yourself, etc.)

  4. Use the line, That life, as I knew it, was gone before I let it go… as your prompt and write whatever comes to mind from there.

  5. Journal or write a poem about soemthing you believed as a child.

  6. Zoom out from your childhood house and write about the surroundings or pick something outside of the house that had an impact on you.

  7. How has time changed yousince leaving your childhood home? Journal or write about what has changed, and what is still the same, about you since childhood.

  8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.