Hopefully, today’s (optional) prompt won’t expose you to controversy. Rather than encouraging minimalism, today we challenge you to write a poem of over-the-top compliments. Pick a person, place, or thing you love, and praise it in the most effusive way you can. Go for broke with metaphors, similes, and more. Need a little inspiration? Perhaps you’ll find it in the lyrics of Cole Porter’s “You’re The Top.”
Ode to a virus
16 April 20 0722
You magnificent mindless microbe
You have stopped the world
You have done what no human or country has ever done
Taken over our world
Our only hope is to join together
And that is unlikely
As we squabble you silence
As we bicker you strangle
As we argue you amplify
You weren’t even the most deadly
Yet you will be featured as Times Virus of the century
Our lips repeat the name we have given you
Yet you take no notice of your hosts
Your silence is your strongest weapon
How you have made us consider our lives
is what most will remember
if there are any of us left
We gained consciousness through a fungus
And now we experience our mortality through an invader
The one who invades our lungs
And causes us to shelter like primitives experiencing a storm
You are our storm
You are without regret or reason
You evolve as quick as lightening
And our attempts to destroy our world as the petulant toddlers we are
Can never match the devastation we are experiencing
Every corner of our world is touched
And we have yet to injure you
We have yet to understand you
If we survive, it will be your will that seems it so
As we pray to deaf gods and search with blinded eyes, covering our mouths with tattered cloth to protect us from you
We are not the masters of this world, and we bow to your magnificence
You alone have turned every country into a prison,
You alone have hardened our hearts
It is your time, may you fall as hard as we have one day
