It’s officially spring and here’s a prompt to help you engage with the colors, sounds, and feelings of the season. I like to call this process (a form of) keyword ekphrasis. 

1. Go outside. Have a journal handy. Create 3 columns. Plan to take 15 minutes to take in the scene.  

2. In one column, spend 3-5 minutes listing all the colors you see or the sounds you hear. You can make quick notes about where you found the colors, or what made the sounds. But no full sentences. 

3. In the second column, spend 3-5 minutes describing what you touch, want to touch, or smell. Stick with short descriptive phrases.

4. Now, circle 2-4 things in each column at random.

5. In the third column, take 3-5 minutes to write a few phrases that bring you back to what you were doing the last spring (these memories don’t have to be things that happened outside). 

6. These are suggestions to help you start writing your poem. Begin with 5 minutes and build in 5-minute segments. Start a line with “Last spring” and bring in a memory from column 3. 

7. Then take one of the colors or sounds you circled in column 1 and end a line with it. Sprinkle in context from your notes as desired. 

8. Start a new line with a circled phrase about sensation or touch from column 2. 

9. Repeat and reverse the steps 6-8. 

10. Take a beat and read what you’ve written. Repeat and build on the process for another 10-15 minutes and you’ll have a draft of a new poem. 

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Jameela F. Dallis, Ph.D., lives in Durham, NC. She has poems, arts journalism, and literary scholarship in Feminist Studies, Honey Literary, The Fight and the Fiddle, Our State, Walter, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, and elsewhere. She’s curated art exhibitions, served in regional curatorial and fellowship committees, taught dozens of university courses, and has facilitated creative workshops for more than a decade. Encounters for the Living and the Dead (River River Books, 2025) is her first book of poetry. Find out more about her work at jameeladallis.com.