Poetry Prompt: Colors - Poetry Teatime
Poetry Prompt: Colors

Poetry Prompt: Colors

It’s now officially spring, and the world is starting to fill with colors again! There’s yellow daffodils on the hillside, pale green leaves emerging on the trees, and soft blue skies above. In today’s poetry prompt, we’ll be looking at colors to create our poem.

There are quite a few ways to write a poem about color, but the first step is to choose your color. We would suggest grabbing a good selection of paint chips from your local paint store or supermarket so that you’ll have plenty of colorful inspiration around you. Plus, you can use the paint chips to create poetry—more on that in a minute!

To get our poetic muscles moving, let’s begin with an exercise to get us thinking in terms of metaphors. For more on metaphor, see this post from Poetry Teatime. So close your eyes and picture the color. Ask yourself what that color feels like (slimy and prickly? scaly? soft like a flower petal?). What does it smell like? Maybe it has the exact scent of a forest of pine trees right after rain, or sunscreen on the beach. How about movement? Does your color zig-zag like a snake or bounce up and down like a yo-yo? Be sure to write your answers down below!

(Your color) ____________ is…
Hot as/Cold as _________________.
It sounds like __________________
and smells like _________________.
It has the taste of _______________.
It looks like ____________________,
Feels like _____________________,
And it moves like _______________.

And that’s it! You’ve now written a poem about a color. But hold on, because we aren’t quite done yet. Remember those paint chips you collected? It’s time to use them to write a paint chip poem!

To write paint chip poetry, choose a few different paint chips. Read each of the names of the colors (“Wild Berry Smoothie,” “Field of Golden Daffodils,” “Winter Dream”). Then, write a line of poetry on each of the paint chips. The challenge is to include the name of the paint chip in that line of your poem! For example, "My butterfly is named Wild Berry Smoothie. / She loves to fly over a Field of Golden Daffodils. / She remembers those flowers in every Winter Dream." 

So go ahead and grab a few paint chips, brainstorm your ideas, and get started writing paint chip poetry! For some inspiration, check out these paint chip poems on Zauberbear.

And that’s it! Now you’ve written two poems about colors today!


Share this page: