Golden Shovel, Poetry, Theme Prompt, Writing Challenge, Writing Prompts

Extraordinary Lies

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for Wea’ve Written Weekly.
Our PoW, Violet, asks us to write a
Golden Shovel poem in which
every line is a lie – except one!

Image by Me & ChatGPT

She tells the glass she has always been a
girl who wanted nothing more than the most
ordinary happiness …. soft, small, beautiful ….
and swears the garden in her palm is no lie,
that the light the little bell jar holds
is proof her whole life could weigh greater
than all the wreckage with its dull, dark allure,
that the ache behind her ribs is stronger than
the rose vines climbing toward the sun, that the
crouched, gray child in the mirror is the ugliest
story she has ever told. Her eyes know the truth.

NAR©2026
#W3

Nancy’s Notes: In a Golden Shovel poem, we borrow a line from an existing poem and use each word from that borrowed line (in order) as the final word of each line in our new poem. My borrowed line is from the poem “The Most Beautiful Lie” by Kevin Patrick II: “A most beautiful lie holds greater allure than the ugliest truth”. You may read the entire poem here.

This is “Little Lies” by Fleetwood Mac

W3 Prompt #219: Wea’ve Written Weekly

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, except where otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.

25 thoughts on “Extraordinary Lies”

    1. I get that, Jim, and you’re not alone. Don’t let anyone tell you poetry is easy; it isn’t …. whether you’re writing it or reading it. For me, it’s a constant learning process and I’m much more comfortable writing stories.

      My poem and the image I created are playing the same trick: ten lines of self-soothing fiction (in other words, lies) … the castle, the lovers, the roses standing in for a pretend life she’s chosen to believe in …. and then the last line subtly cracks it open as that’s the one true line. Everything before it is the golden jar; the last line is the broken mirror finally getting a word in.

      When you read the last word of each line, they form the line I borrowed from “The Most Beautiful Lie” by Kevin Patrick: “A most beautiful lie holds greater allure than the ugliest truth”.

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      1. I don’t need to understand poetry to enjoy it, but I appreciate you explaining what was going on in your poem, as that helped me make better sense of it. I don’t enjoy reading stories that are filled with nonsense, but poetry works differently for me.

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    2. BTW, I heard back from Akismet re spam. Here’s what they said:

      Jul 13, 2026, 17:37 GMT+3

      Hi there,

      I looked into this and made an adjustment that should help going forward.

      The owner of poetisatinta.wordpress.com will need to mark any pending spam comments from you as “Not Spam” in order for them to appear on their site.

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      Let’s hope it works!

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