In grade school, I used to love those assignments where the teacher gave us ten vocabulary words and said we had to use all of them in a story. Those were good times, and I’ve already tried to revive them here in prose and poetry. 
Today, the NaPoWriMo prompt at Read Write Poem invited us to use some or all of a list of randomly generated words. Poetic Asides gave a prompt on longing. So I began a poem on a topic I longed to explore in verse – frogs – and used several of the random words. But the others didn’t fit. I couldn’t stand it; I longed to use them all. So I went back to the list and arranged all the words into a non-frog poem. Now I can relax and have some coffee. Perhaps I’ll let the frogs croak another day.
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Lunacy
It’s wicked lunacy -
this backwards refraction
through the crystalline
prism of memory,
mining specimens
of still nascent hopes
from the veins
of those hardscrabble
times of leaking piggybanks
to craft
an impossible cadence
in words.
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You’ve done an amazing job here and you’ve got a poem in reserve. I didn’t even try to use all the words. Hardscrabble wasn’t even in my lexicon until I looked it up. I thought it was something to do with the game.
Carole – To heck with the dictionary. I think using it to mean the game would make an interesting poem.
Very nice. I like how you incorporated the words into this poem.
your poem is like a song coming together in a clear cadence. enjoy your coffee!
This is one of my favorites of the prompt responses.
Kudos on fitting all the words into a cohesive little gem! It is fun to see what everyone does with the same words.
I think the wordles are my favorite prompts…
(and maybe you can do something with the frogs tomorrow–isn’t April 28th some sort of save-the-frog day?)
Damn. Those were my donated words and I had trouble fitting them into a short poem. Good job — I like how you used the words.