Prompt #126 – What Are You Thankful For?

Here in the U.S., Thanksgiving will be celebrated this week on Thursday, November 22nd. Our Thanksgiving has a long history beginning in 1621 when the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast that is considered the first Thanksgiving celebration. For over 200 years, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. In 1827, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Finally, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln set the last Thursday in November as the official day for a national Thanksgiving observance. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week, and in 1941 Roosevelt signed a bill that designated the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

Gratitude is a developmental emotion, and books have been written on its psychology. Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” There are times in our lives when we feel more Grinch than grateful, especially when the stresses of every day living gather momentum and all but overwhelm us. However, acknowledging and expressing our gratitude can have a beneficial effect on our lives, relationships, and work.

What are you grateful for? This week let’s write about a specific thing for which we’re grateful.

A French proverb tells us, “Gratitude is the heart’s memory.” Our first step in writing this week will be to remember—to look into our memories and to identify a single thing for which we’re especially grateful.

When you're ready to write:

1. Make a list of things for which you’re thankful.
2. Choose one item from the list.
3. Free write about the item you chose.
4. Look at your free write and select images and details for your poem.
5. Draft your poem.
6. Your poem may be stichic (one stanza with no line breaks), it may be a formal poem (ode, sonnet, villanelle, or a kyrielle as we worked with in Prompt #32, November 20, 2010); you may choose to write a prose poem or your poem may take the form of prayer or a letter.
7. As you write, think about the reasons for your gratitude and show (without telling) what those feelings mean.
8. Dig deeply to reach beyond the specifics of your personal experience to the underlying universal subject with which your readers will identify.

Note: You might address or dedicate your poem to a person for whom you're thankful, or you might go to the flip side and write about a challenging time (or a time of adversity) that somehow led you to feelings of gratefulness (my mom used to say that good always comes from bad).

Examples:

"Thanks" by W. S. Merwin

"Te Deum" by Charles Reznikoff

"Thanksgiving Letter from Harry" by Carl Dennis

"The Thanksgivings" by Harriet Maxwell Converse

Click here for a related article and a list of additional poems at Poets.org.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My sincerest thanks to all of you for following this blog 

and for being part of its shared poetry experience!