Poetry Challenge #251-Roll of the Dice
Know who coined the idiom “The die is cast”?
If you answered Shakespeare, thinking it one of the many idioms and phrases William Shakespeare coined for his plays, think again. It was Julius Caesar, and no not in the Shakespeare play either. The real Julius Caesar.
Technically, according to my go-to, Writing Explained.org, Roman historian, Suetonius, said, what Caesar said was Alea iacta est, the Latin phrase meaning “die is cast.” The year was 49 B.C and Caesar had just entered Italy with his army, thus starting a civil war.
Since then, the saying “the die is cast,” has come to mean that the dice—literal six-sided gaming cubes—had been thrown and whatever numbers had come up were the numbers that would be played. For Caesar it meant that it was too late to stop the war from beginning. He had already disobeyed orders, and he must win the war if he wanted to keep his life. On that cheery note, let’s toss some dice!
Poetry Challenge #251
Roll The Dice!
Topics for poems are all around us, but sometimes we don’t know how to start.
This is a simple exercise you can use as many times as necessary to create a structure for a poem.
Roll a pair of dice. The lower number indicates how many words should be on each line. The higher number indicates how many lines in the poem.
(If you don’t have dice, you can use the A-6 cards in a deck of cards. Or use a number generator on the computer. Or make slips of paper with the numbers 1-6 on them and draw numbers from a hat…)
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Warm up the dice with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s song “Roll the Dice”! It’s a winner!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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