For November, I look to poem and book titles related to Thanksgiving and Fall for inspiration.  I fell in love with the title of Douglas Florian’s poetry collection Autumnblings, which beautifully captures this time of year and have chosen it for the name of November’s prompt challenge.

The poems and books that these prompts are drawn from represent many different voices and points of view.  I hope that you find them as evocative as I do and that you will be intrigued enough to learn more about them.

There is only one rule to my prompt challenge: the poem or book title should serve as the title of your piece OR all the words of the title should be integrated into your piece somehow.   

I LOVE posting your prompt responses on Brave & Reckless.  I welcome your poetry, prose, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, essay, and art.  I will accept responses to any of November’s prompts on any day, but will not start publishing them on Brave & Reckless until November 1st.

Email your prompt responses with a short bio and a suggested image to her.red.pen.wordsmithing@gmail.com.

You can also participate on Instagram by tagging your writing/art with:

• #AutumnblingsChallenge2021
• #dailyprompt
• @stitchypoet

---

SAMHAIN BY ANNIE FINCH

(The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,

…Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and who I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother’s mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for,
intimate, a waiting bounty,
“Carry me.” She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Originally published on BookRiot