Valentine's Day Writing Prompts
- Elise Cope
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
Our second annual Hearts + Verses workshop was held on 2/12 at Island Verse headquarters. You can join us virtually in some heart-centered reflection with the writing prompts below, and maybe find a little inspiration from selected poems by Andrea Gibson, Jeffrey McDaniel, and Elise Cope.
Writing Prompts
Love personified: Explore the perspective of an inanimate object's love for something else, or it's "person".
Unspoken love: The words you’ve never shared—what you wish you could say but never did.
Love letters to things or places: Pen a love letter to your favorite place, memory, or an item that you hold dear.
Anti-love: Renouncing love, lust, entanglements, and relational burdens.
Heart Healing: Mending heartbreak or finding closure with yourself or others.
Self-love: Explorations of love and/or appreciation—a love poem to yourself.
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ARCHIPELAGO OF KISSES
by Jeffrey McDaniel
We live in a modern society.
Husbands and wives don’t grow on trees,
like in the old days. So where does one find love?
When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses.
There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch.
The we shouldn’t be doing this kiss.
The but your lips taste so good kiss.
The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss.
The I know your tongue like the back of my hand kiss.
As you get older, kisses become scarce.
You’ll be driving home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out.
If you were younger, you’d pull over,
slide open the mouth’s red door just to see how it fits.
Oh where does one find love?
If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear.
It’ll get suspicious and stare at your toes.
Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
It’ll turn bright pink and explode
into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed
and sneak out of your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights.
Notice how it illuminates the room.
Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses
comes from a special beach.
Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss
in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others.
The intersection of function and desire.
The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I’m dead,
I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil,
just to be next to your bones.
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Love Letter from the Afterlife | Andrea Gibson
My love, I was so wrong.
Dying is the opposite of leaving.
When I left my body, I did not go away.
That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here.
I am more here than I ever was before.
I am more with you than I ever could have imagined.
So close you look past me when wondering where I am.
It’s Ok.
I know that to be human is to be farsighted.
But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living.
Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?
Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?”
In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said.
At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets.
All day I listen to the radio of your memories.
Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less.
When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials.
Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you.
One day you will understand.
One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited.
There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning.
I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not.
My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving.
I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.
Do you understand?
It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop.
It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted.
I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth.
I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.
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Back from Saturn | Elise Cope What do we think of this
fumbling toward ecstasy
A baseline fingering the sternum—tailbone proud,
heartfeet mastering a path up the spine
through careful breath
Heroisms hung nightly
in voiceless light, alluding to your arrival
Alone in linen I shoegazed, sightpining witt
Clearing the pedestal—jazz-pans to the front,
cis-sailors to the back
Riding last millennium's Starlight
to find itself washed up
on my mothflickered porch legs
And this is where you found my house
Under my coffee table you found laughscraps
still echoing their ride back from Saturn’s rings
Screenprints yearning your eyefull
Cutlass hands to scare the bookspines
from my shelves
A haberdashery of spasms, guttural and ripe
with tomorrow’s vulnerability hangover
What’s left to be had
if we keep fumbling into these nights
full of your next word
Are we capable of discernment and caution
in the static velveteen of our video chats
Can I refrain from your solitude
Have these same words been uttered before
In your void I find a reflection
that sees me wanting more, twisting
a burnt bulb for one last lick
From the maker: This beautifully hand crafted wooden Listening Heart is designed to be held by a person as they Silently listen to another speak. The Heart will remind the Listener that Love assists in Communication! If and when the Listener wants to speak, the Heart will be gently passed to their receptive companion. The roles are now reversed. Holding the Heart will remind the Listener to indeed listen...not interrupt... The Speaker will Appreciate the full attention of the Listener....The Listener knows their turn to speak will come in time."
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