Writing prompt for tinywords 17.1

A mainstay of haiku and much of short form poetry is seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. This issue?s writing prompt features the interaction of charged particles with atoms in the upper atmosphere (that’s the textbook definition). But we know them as the aurora borealis, or the northern lights. For those who have seen the aurora borealis in person there certainly is an element of the other-worldly going on. Some form of natural magic. Or maybe you see something else. Let us know in a poem. We invite you to put your best inspired efforts in the comment box below. We?ll select the best of the best to start the next issue of tinywords, due out in mid-March.

Keep in mind, we will continue to accept regular submissions for the next issue (issue 17.1) through the end of February at our Submit page.

Thanks for dropping by and for sharing your poems.

All best,

239 thoughts on “Writing prompt for tinywords 17.1”

  1. northern lights
    a boy makes a ladder
    out of his telescope

    Alan Summers
    Publication Credit: Blithe Spirit 24.3 (August 2014); Scope (Fellowship of Writers, Queensland) April 2015 volume 61 no 3

      1. Thank you!

        Ah, yes, the constellations a constant wonder for many of us. :-)

        ursa major
        a plane's navigation lights
        leave the system

        Alan Summers
        Publication credit: Asahi Shimbun, Japan (September 2016)

  2. Trees reaching
    to the sun's bright shadow . . .
    winter night

    Imagining
    the cold wind on my face
    frost flowers

  3. __ While watching the Northern Lights, seers may imagine the light's rhythm is the guide of their pulse. _m

    lights throb
    above this north forest strand
    the seers pulse

  4. the giraffes neck
    so long peeks
    stripping the leaves
    camouflaged in the northern light
    as trees take climb
    the heights of the sky
    escape
    escape
    the illusion

    1. a wonderful sense of an untold story here
      as if the speaker awoke to the phone ringing.
      Was it a wrong number? dead air? static?
      and looking up perhaps a bigger mystery revealed . . .

  5. The Patience of a Terraformer

    Waiting on stern glaciers
    to fashion fjords from granite;
    genera to flower, fruit;
    the aurora-abiding longmind
    composes luminous veils of sky.
    Mountains rise. The garden grows.

  6. solstice
    the northern lights
    shape-shift
    over frozen prairie
    I curl my hand into yours

    More Grows in a Crooked Row, Tanka Conversations, Inkling Press 2016

  7. the brilliance
    of New Year's fireworks
    at forty below
    the colder it gets
    the warmer we are

    Neon Graffiti, Tanka Poetry of Urban Life, 2016

  8. Edge of Alaska

    I'm watching the TV show dedicated to a bunch of people settled in the abandoned miners' town McCarthy, isolated from the whole world during the long winter. When asked about their motives, some of them mention the unspeakable beauty of a wild nature, or a chance to prove themselves in the struggle for survival. But above all they treasure the seclusion, when there's not a soul for miles around, no need to talk to anybody, and one can live upon his own rules.

    I find it strange that someone needed to get to such a wilderness to achieve it. Alaska is all around us. The light years of loneliness, deep snow-white banks of silence, depleted resources, a signal lost in the vast ether.

    smoky saloon –
    a glimpse of northern lights
    in the empty glass

  9. Imagination turned into reality
    Bright colours spread everywhere
    Spread far and wide
    Like painting on a canvas.

    Everyone is taken by surprise
    Everyone has got the same question in mind
    Definitely what's this?

    Nothing else, but it's aurora borealis.

  10. shimmers of night sky neurons
    these neon strands of thought
    skip, skittering and fluttering

    as if sun, a primal and collective love
    were surging across the cold
    through windswept drapes

  11. shimmering above
    those old ice-floe hunters
    curtains of mystery
    how many more millennia before we
    truly know the ways of Earth and sky

  12. Arctic Lights Carnival

    Charged Particle Popcorn
    Greenish Glow Sodas

    Ride the Solar Wind
    Frozen Fun House
    Crazy Coronas

    Geomagnetic Storm Alerts
    Sled Dod Parking

  13. northern lights
    she wants to hear the fairy tale
    over again

    *
    northern lights
    she weaves herself
    into the fairy tale

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