Day One

May Poetry Prompts

Friends,

Welcome. We will be keeping these posts short and sweet, but I just want to remind us why we are here.

I hope that you don’t feel like you have to participate every day in writing a poem if life just gets busy, but I do hope you’ll try to hold some space for yourself if you need it.

So, this is day one of May Poetry Prompts, also called A Poem a Day in the Month of May, also called A Poem a Day Keeps us From Dying Inside.

Today’s word is SUCCESS, and my poem is below.

Feel free to share your poems in the comments, and if you’re not comfortable with that, it’s totally okay! Share them with a friend or loved one, or keep them close just for you.

Success.

They tell us how it’s supposed to be—

success is earned,

learned,

fought for,

worth dying for,

success is a thing that you’ll

climb every mountain

to achieve.

But I think there’s a gentler way.

What if success, for you, for me,

is simply learning to be—

to be with ourselves,

to be with the quiet,

to be with Earth, our Mother,

to be when the noise is loud,

to be when the hustle is demanding,

to be when we “should” be going.

Success isn’t a thing to earn or achieve,

but a letting go

so that we get to the right stuff,

the good stuff,

the stuff of magic and love

in the end.

Success to them is an unattainable dream.

Success for us, right now, is this moment’s breath

and every little sliver of sacredness that follows.