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23 September 2025

Posted by Harley Truslove

Love Poems!

Love was in the air today, much to the annoyance of some of our poets! Ali and Harley performed part of Romeo & Juliet’s Act 2 Scene 2 (after starting over three times because more writers kept entering, and finding that Harley got slightly louder with each iteration) then we had a twist on fill-in fun: our writers had to fill out the blanks within the scene itself, being as serious or as silly as they liked.


Some writers just added the suffix “-eth” to every word to translate it into Shakespearian. One of our writers had Romeo exiting mid scene, remarking in the stage directions that Juliet had dodged a bullet with that one. We also had such classic lines as:


“Shall I hear more, or shall I announce my presence in an overdramatic manner?”


“Deny thy father and refuse thy name;

Or, if thou wilt not, I’ll ghost you on discord like it’s 2021.”


“And for that name, which is no part of thee,

Take my Tesco bag for life.”


The group discussed love poems and how one defines a love poem. Ali got the writers to look at a few examples which she had pinned to the wall, and add a sticker to their favourite one. Popular choices were “The sun has burst the sky” by Jenny Joseph, “The Orange” by Wendy Cope, and “Love Poem, written in haste (with Autocorrect on)” by Brian Bilston.


A few of the poets took the exercise at face value with beautiful verse about the coming of spring, or how they admire someone. Others wrote love poems to nuclear war, or just scribbled on the page because they didn’t fancy writing a love poem, which is absolutely understandable. 


To finish off, our writers got into pairs and wrote conversational love poems, one doing one line and then the other replying to it. It mostly descended into arguments or discussions about mutual loathing.


Rowan was our writer of the week with his very accurate fill-in of the Romeo & Juliet scene, as well as his touching love poem about his neighbour leaving to the churchyard every morning with fresh flowers and cleaning supplies.

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