1. Choose a date that is significant to you: Your parents’ wedding day; the day you think you were conceived; the day you got your first car; ANY red-letter day in your life or in the history of your family.
2. Look up your chosen date on the internet. You my Google it or there are a number of websites – www.history.com/this-day-in-history is a good one. You’ll get a list and short description of notable events and anniversaries occurring on that day.
Pick one. You can research the event or the people involved further if you wish.
3, Use your significant date as a title, with a short epigraph explaining the correlating historical event:
March 23, 2011
Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor dies at 79
4. Write a stanza in first person, present tense, that describes your personal event. Include physical details: the sounds, smells, sights, the weather, etc.
5. Write a stanza as an all-knowing narrator, also in present tense, describing the historical event. It should be roughly equal in length to the first stanza. Be as detailed and specific as you were with the first event.
6. Write a third stanza that braids or incorporates additional details or specifics about each event.
Submitted by Elizabeth Iannaci
If you write a poem from this prompt, post it as a comment underneath the prompt in the Poetry Super Highway Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetrysuperhighway
