Poetry is a beautiful thing, because you can write about anything. If you have no idea what to write about, try this exercise. Close your eyes and think of a person, place, or thing that you really love. Write down 4 descriptive words to describe this person, place, or thing.

Example: Magnificent, Beautiful, Extraordinary.

When you are visualizing also write down the colors that stand out the most to you. Choose at least 3 or 4 colors. Now you should have your colors and descriptive words. Alright, get your pen or pencil ready. Time to write some poetry. Here is my short poem.

The sound of the river was peaceful,

Surrounded by green shrubs and yellow flowers.

White waterfalls sparkling in the sun,

Beautiful Autumn red leaves falling,

Relaxing in the shade, the perfect day.

Right now this may not make sense, but at least you have a starting point. A poem does not have to rhyme, but I could make this poem a near rhyme.

The sound of the river was peaceful,

The red leaves of Autumn beautiful,

White Waterfalls sparkling,

The sounds, so relaxing.

OK now it’s starting to sound a little better, but there is still something missing. We need to bring in emotions and let the reader know how we feel about this person, place, or thing. What do we love about it? How does it make us feel? For your finished poem you can use all of the words you wrote down earlier, but you don’t have too. With that said lets take a look at our finished product.

Mists from the waterfall sparkled in the light,

Revealing a beautiful rainbow, to my delight.

The sounds brought me peace, relaxing in the shade,

Drifting off to sleep, in the Autumn leaves I laid.

As you can see the finished poem sounds much different than what we originally started with. That tells me that this little exercise worked. My point is that it doesn’t have to make sense when you first start out learning how to write poetry.

The main thing is to keep writing and get those creative juices flowing. Remember your poem does not have to rhyme. If you do choose to rhyme though, do not try to be poetic and visualize at the same time. If you do your poem is not going to make sense and it will end in frustration.

Good Luck with your poems and I hope this article helped.