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Poetry

If I Wrote 100 Poems

A poem about poems

Dr. Casey Lawrence
Promptly Written
Published in
4 min readMar 29, 2022

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Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

If I wrote one hundred poems,
would one of them be good enough,
speak to someone,
scratch an itch,
or grace the pages of a book that
someone might read again
in one hundred years?

Would a poem win a prize or
gain a retweet and a like from that boy
I used to know, who leaned his bicycle
against my mom’s new car and scratched it,
if I wrote one hundred poems?

If I wrote one hundred poems,
would one of them be folded into a flower
and dropped down the barrel of a gun
in an act of defiant mercy
captured by a Reuters livestream
turned into a meme
and then one day, in a history class,
shown to bored tweens
who don’t know the difference
between a poem and a bullet?

Would this fear creeping up from my belly —
this fear that the whole world is on the brink
and all we can do is…

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Promptly Written
Promptly Written

Published in Promptly Written

Promptly Written is the place to find prompts for all your writing needs. Monthly themes and weekly prompts will be made available. Snag only the ones you like. Write whenever, wherever the mood strikes you.

Dr. Casey Lawrence
Dr. Casey Lawrence

Written by Dr. Casey Lawrence

Canadian author of three LGBT YA novels. PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Check out my lists for stories by genre/type.

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