For the past several years I’ve enjoyed the creative prompts for the New Year Poetry Challenge (NYPC) from the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. Each day from mid-December to mid-January, they offer up an original and rich prompt, encouraging you to take it in any direction you’d like. You even have the option to send in one poem to be considered for entry in their annual NYPC chapbook. This year I shared the first ten prompts with my writing group, and Catherine Flynn liked one so much that she chose it for our Inklings challenge. The theme: Secrets. The task: “Write a poem about secrets——family, community/societal, governmental, personal, etc.”

Way back in December, when I first responded to this prompt in my notebook, I was also working on Heidi Mordhorst’s fabulous Yuletide prompts, one of which was to “try to write about effort”. These two prompts combined into this poem:

This pen holds secrets

You can tell by the way
it resists the pull of paper
how you have to exert force
to mark the page
how the ink bleeds and blots
and each letter requires
just a bit more effort
so that your hand aches
as the weight of those secrets
coagulates
until you
and the pen
come to
a stuttering
silent
stop.

©Molly Hogan

This week Mary Lee Hahn hosts the Poetry Friday Roundup at her blog, A(nother) Year of Reading. She shares her response to this prompt there. To check out what the other Inklings did with this prompt, go to the links below:

Catherine Flynn
Linda Mitchell
Heidi Mordhorst
Margaret Simon

And then, just because everyone should listen to this song more frequently…