5 Poetry Prompts for Writing a Christian Poem this Lent

On my Opium Cactus poetry blog, I'm running a 'Write a Christian Poem for Lent' contest. And you don't have to like or read poetry to participate.

I personally was never a poetry geek. I never went around high school with poetry books clutched to my chest. The little poetry I read was what was forced on me in school.

Yet when I first started writing the first thing I did was write tons of poetry in a very modern/avant-garde/weird style. The best of these poems were collected years later in my book 'Where the Opium Cactus Grows'.

How can the ordinary, average writer come up with a Lenten poem? Here are some suggestions:

1. Get a Christian book--- the Bible, a Mass book, a devotional book--- and one secular book--- an antique farming book, a history book, or something cute by Karl Marx. Open each book at random, point without looking to a sentence or phrase, and write it down. Do this several more times. The resulting word-salad can be the first draft of your poem. Or it can serve as a series of poetic prompts.

2. Get a Bible dictionary or other Christian reference book. Open it at random and point without looking. The major topic of the paragraph you pointed to is your first topic. (I used the book 'Catholicism for Dummies' and got 'Gospel of Life')
Then get a regular dictionary or other secular reference work. The word whose definition you are pointing at is the second topic. (I used an ordinary English dictionary and got 'ice'.) Use these two words as a poetic prompt.

3. Find a secular poem you like (or don't like.) Do a Christian parody. Here is an example of a parody of my poem 'soap opera hero':

crucifix hero

he gets nailed a lot
and
sometimes
he dies

but then
he rises

4. If you like rhymed/metered poetry but can't work out how to write it, find a folksong you like. Pick any topics you like. Make a poem whose words have the same rhythm as the original folksong lyrics, and that rhyme.

5. If you have some ideas for a poem but they sound too prosy to you, write them down. Then go to Babelfish.com. Type out the words you have written and translate them into an exotic language like Korean. Copy the result and paste it in, translating it from Korean back to English. The results may be exotic, memorable or incomprehensible. All of these are good things. Try your word-set on other languages. The best phrases that result can serve as the first draft of your poem, or can be your poetic prompts.

So--- you are hereby challenged! Write a poem this Lent. It doesn't have to be profound or wonderful or epic at first glance. It just has to be. And be entered in my poetry contest of course.