My Poetry Diary

is not the same as my desk diary;
it doesn’t contain appointments,
birthdays and other mundane things.

It’s a diving board to a sea of ideas,
in which I can swim any stroke I want.

I can float, deep dive, tread water
while I watch clouds pass by or
tickle a dolphin. It’s a joy to explore!

It’s a companion to bounce off beach
balls of ideas, a reminder of sand
between the toes and wave susurration.

Prompts pop up, flying fish to catch
without a net, and words I’d like to play
with, like ‘doughty’: soft and squidgy,
a bread roll full of fearless resolution.  

A doughty poet. That’s what I strive to be,
assisted by my companion, a diary for poetry.

Kim M. Russell, 25^th April 2026

It’s the final Saturday and Day 25 of NaPoWriMo, and the optional prompt is inspired by Melissa Kwasny’s poem ‘The Apple Tree in Blossom’, in which she “strings together fantastical metaphors for the apple tree before shifting into exclamations, definitions, and a series of nimble, tonal shifts – and seeming changes in topic – before circling around back to the apple tree.”

We are writing poems in which we must use at least three metaphors for a single thing, include an exclamation, ruminate on the definition of a word, and come back in the closing line to the image or idea with which we opened our poems.