THE WRITER’S CHALLENGE

Much peace. For Day 11 of National Poetry Writing Month, the prompt is:

Write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned booksat the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

I chose to create my blackout poem from a text called, “Develop a model to transition an african american pentacostal church to a multicultural ministry” by Elijah Solomon.

Here is my poem:

THE WRITER’S CHALLENGE

By Farah Lawal Harris, 2026

The writer observed that churches

never deviate from traditional worship.

In most, the pastor is the sole power.

Many lack exposure

to ideas outside their doctrine.

They never examined the unquestioned.

Operating with blindfolds

leads to limited vision.

Culturally diverse community

was very important to the writer

with limited resources and a burning desire

to challenge direction that seemed impossible

from the new version of the Holy Bible.