How It Works:

1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts below

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Tomorrow

There will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For 24 hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the Internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars…

Barbara Crooker
https://www.barbaracrooker.com/index.php

If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

The next Read-Around is 12/11/25 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Barbara Crooker’s poem, Tomorrow, offers a playful, almost cartoonish, vision of a better future packed into a single day in the elusive container of “tomorrow.” The opening line reads like a weather report which frames the whole day as a series of straight-forward, matter-of-fact conditions that leads us, almost inexorably, back to the simple joys of childhood. She is tapping into the power of “tomorrow,” a single word that holds the ever present future and can free range from the immediacy of the day that comes after a night of sleep to the someday on an endless vague and elusive future timeline. Tomorrow excites us with the promise of dazzling possibilities and stalls us with the dread of potential disasters. It is the placeholder for procrastination and rainbow over a better life. Tomorrow offers hope, a sense of second chances, a pathway to build toward something that can never be done in a single day. What does “tomorrow” evoke in you? What do you put there? What is waiting there for you?

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem titled Tomorrow.

2. Write your version of a magical day: what would change in the world, in your life, in you?

3. Write about the future as if it is a weather report using Crooker’s poem as a template with the opening line, There will be…followed by a series of short matter-of fact statements.

4. Contemporary wisdom advocates living fully in the present “as if there is no tomorrow.” Journal or write a poem about what it would really be like, for you, to live as if there were no tomorrow. What might be the consequences (positive and negative).

5. What might you read in the “long lines of cold code written in the stars” if you looked up to the night sky for answers?

6. Write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.