Hey there fellow writers and poets.

Bring your awareness to the beauty of winter in these poetry prompts all about the birds. The “ways to play” ideas focus on hard-working verbs, digging deeper with metaphors and similes, and playful alliteration. Take a look if you’d like to try something new or a different way into a poem, or, if you’re inspired by the main prompts, jump right into writing!

These prompts are suitable for beginning and more experienced poets looking for creative inspiration. If you write for children, simply interpret the prompts in a way that suits the age group you write for.

Prompt 1

Write a poem about the way a winter bird flies.

Ways to Play:

• The particular bird you choose will depend on where you live and which birds you can see from your window or close by. Whichever bird you choose, spend a few minutes simply observing it. How do its wings move? How does it land? Where does it land? Play with and try out some different verbs to describe the action of flying. Think about the image the verb creates as well as how it sounds and looks on the page.
• As you observe your bird – or birds – think about where they are. For example, is your bird flying into a snow-dusted evergreen? Or is it chasing its friends way up in a cool winter sky? Decide if you want to zoom in and capture small details related to how the bird flies or zoom out and describe the bird from a distance. Think about how to capture your preferred perspective in poetic form. Could you, for example, play with white space on the page?
• Let’s really play with those hard-working verbs here. I challenge you to write a 3-line poem with only 2 words that are not verbs! All the other words in your poem must be verbs – in any form or tense. There are no rules for your title!

Prompt 2

Write a poem about winter birds that includes these 3 words: feathers, path, branch

Ways to Play:

• Try your hand at an extended metaphor poem. Pair a concrete noun (your chosen winter bird) with an abstract noun (joy, hope, happiness, etc.) and show how the two are connected in your poem. A starting line, for example, might be: “joy is a chickadee in winter.” (Read Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” for inspiration.)
• Finish these similes and use them to inspire your own winter bird similes: Sparrows’ feathers patterned like … / bird prints on the path, as … as … / the Northern cardinal lands on the icy branch like ….
• Activate different senses using metaphor or simile. For example: what might feathers sound like? How could you describe the sound of a bird on a snowy path? What does an icy branch feel like?

Prompt 3

Use this line as the first or last line of a poem: As day creeps to night, the snowy owl takes flight

Ways to Play:

• Write a rhyming poem (especially if you usually only write free verse!)
• Play with alliteration or assonance in the poem. Choose a sound that connects to a snowy owl in some way for you and build it into your poem.
• To warm up your alliteration and assonance muscles, brainstorm some words with similar sounds to the words below. Use one or more in your poem if they spark inspiration: the “s” /s/ or “o” /oʊ/ sounds of the word “snow”; the “o” /aʊ/ or “l” /l/ sounds of the word “owl”; the “w” /w/ or “t” /t/ sounds of the word “winter.”

Happy Writing!

Looking for more poetry prompts? Find more prompts on the “For Writers & Poets” page of my website or in my book, “Write Your Own Joy: 31 Poetry Prompts.”