Last week I challenged myself to come up with ten first lines of a sonnet, which traditionally contains fourteen lines of ten syllables and five beats each.
And so I did do a bit of writing this week– I made this challenge public to nudge myself and maybe others to stop thinking about writing or not writing and to simply write. My inner Yoda prodded me to get my creative mind back in gear.
Not all of the lines below contain ten syllables, and probably not even one of them is iambic pentameter, but if anyone would like to use one of these to write their own poem, I leave it to you to revise and make it suit your purposes.
For more inspiration, as well as a reminder that you can forget prosody and meter, I suggest you check out “Notes on Walking Poetry” by Dave Bonta, who says, “To hell with the metrical foot. Free your verse and your mind will follow… at a walker’s pace.”
Ten Eleven First Lines
Some of these are found texts that I pieced together, others come from old diary entries.
- O love! O chaos! O wind in the trees!
- The instability of honey bees
- I snatched a snippet of joy on the fly
- A harsh light seeking some pallid shape
- I opened my eyes to a blur of leaves
- A ghost in the barely breathing silence
- Walking through a cloud–droplets beaded my black wool
- Today, I painted a tropical bird
- I cried in the parking lot, my friend as witness
- A family of deer stepped along a creek bed
- Thunder shook the rain loose and then it cleared
If you decide to use one of these lines above, please let me know! Feel free to share in the comments section, or leave one of your own lines here and we can write a collaborative poem. If you drop me a line, I’ll respond in kind.
Balanced On the Edge 
A ghost in the barely breathing silence – especially like this one! That ghost to me is ” the unspoken word”…
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I found these words from the beginning of Brave New World by Auldous Huxley. I pieced this phrase together from a whole page of text.
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Confused Love Poem
from a line suggested by Christine Swint
O love! O chaos! O wind in the trees!
Find me hiding here like a frightened whelp:
the song of the breeze, a low sudden yelp
insists its way through the middling tease
of autumn. I slip into a crisp crease
between bad living and praying for help.
The trees jolt; love hits with late autumn’s skelp,
rain shaking down the leaves, a frantic wheeze
towards death.
But what of chaos, what of love?
These things we hold in our heart’s pocket, deep
and lined soft with corduroy: persisting.
So I’ll make the best of fate’s hasty shove
into your arms, embrace the maelstrom’s sweep,
hope for your devotion, everlasting.
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Love this, JC! Cool rhymes with yelp/help/skelp
I like “autumn’s skelp” so much! I had to look up “ skelp,” what a cool word, and you make a great metaphor with it. Wonderful!
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“towards death” and “but what of chaos…”should have been on the same line.
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