NaPoWriMo Day 13: The Gold Light in Quiet Rooms

By @RWhiteAuthor 🌿 NaPoWriMo Day 13: Inspired by Donald Justice’s “There is a gold light in certain old paintings” Today’s poem explores memory, art, and the way moments—like brushstrokes—blur and echo in the mind. Following Justice’s self-invented form, each stanza holds six lines of twelve syllables. …

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NaPoWriMo Day 9: The Bell Beyond the Fog

By @RWhiteAuthor For today’s NaPoWriMo prompt, I wanted to capture the haunting weight of sound in stillness. Inspired by the way fog distorts noise and reshapes perception, this poem leans into rhyme and the echo of a singular, specific sound: the distant clang of an old …

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Blaze – Creative Writing Using Symbolism

You don’t choose to be a firefighter. You don’t choose to be a hero.

It’s a fire that burns inside you. Like an ember lodged in your chest that never dies, no matter how hard you try to smother it…

In Blaze, Chase Bowdry runs into burning buildings not because he wants to—but because he can’t imagine being anyone else. When a fire threatens to consume a warehouse and the girl trapped inside, Chase is forced to confront what drives him: legacy, survival, and something deeper.

Not all fires destroy. Some reveal.

🔥 “He used to think the helmet made him who he was. But now, he knew the truth… He saw himself as a flame—not the kind that consumes. The kind that carries light.”

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NaPoWriMo Day 6 – Cinnamon

By @RWhiteAuthor Today’s #NaPoWriMo prompt asked poets to explore the taste of something—through texture, sound, and emotion. Inspired by the spice that stirs both comfort and memory, “Cinnamon” captures the burn behind nostalgia and the golden weight of something half-remembered but wholly felt.   Row Column …

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We Played Terribly

By @RWhiteAuthor Day 5 of NaPoWriMo prompt is inspired by musical notation, and particularly those little italicized –and often Italian – instructions you’ll find over the staves in sheet music, like con allegro or andante. First, pick a notation from the first column below. Then, pick …

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“The Painting by the Window”

By @RWhiteAuthor Today’s (optional) prompt. In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. And well, that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art …

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Why I Am Not a Painter

By @RWhiteAuthor Day 3 Prompt: The American poet Frank O’Hara was an art critic and friend to numerous painters and poets In New York City in the 1950s and 60s. His poems feature a breezy, funny, conversational style. His poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” is …

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NaPoWriMo Day 2: From Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this blackout poem explores the philosophy of self-overcoming. Nietzsche famously wrote, “One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star.” This piece embraces that tension—how darkness, struggle, and the unknown shape transformation. The erasure leaves behind fragments of existential battle and ascent, mirroring the journey of one who dares to evolve beyond their former self.

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