Today’s poetry prompt will combine all your real-life questions about the natural world with some wild, wacky, and wonderful answers. Hold on to your thinking caps and let’s get started!
Go for a nature walk or sit outside. Look around you and start to ask the question “why.” Wonder about what you see, hear, feel, and smell, around you.
Where does wind come from? Why is grass green? How do birds fly? Why does the sunset turn the sky pink and gold?
Once you’ve brainstormed some questions, write down your favorites. Take a few more minutes to think and use your imagination to add any other questions you have about the world of nature. Why does the ocean have waves? What makes stars look so tiny?
Now, choose one of your questions and try to answer it using only your own thoughts. Let your imagination run wild.
Maybe the grass is green because, a long time ago at the beginning of the world, everything was clear like glass. Then one day a girl decided she wanted to paint colors onto the world.
She gathered her paintbrush and a bucket of paint and got to work. She started with the sky and painted it blue, but the paint started to run and smear at the edges so she mixed in some pink and yellow at the corners and that’s how we got the first sunset.
Then she started to paint the trees green. Unfortunately, she had terrible hay fever so she kept sneezing while she worked and splattering the trees with red and yellow by accident! So she had to redo the whole thing and that’s how the leaves changed color for the first time.
She decided to paint the grass green, too, but she’d learned her lesson this time and waited until she didn’t have hay fever to start painting. That’s why grass doesn’t change colors!
It’s your turn to try it out. Make up a story or answers to the question you asked. Your answer can be as unpredictable and crazy as you want.
Then, once you’ve imagined your answer, it’s time to turn that answer into a poem. Go ahead and start writing!
