W3’s Poet‑of‑the‑Week, Hope (aka Srijita), challenges us to write a Dinggedicht. Eh? Wassat‽
I read her guidelines and learnt a bit about it. Click below to read Hope’s full details.
Hope’s prompt: Be the thing
Write a Dinggedicht: a poem that enters so deeply into a thing that the thing seems to speak for itself through image, texture, movement, and sensation alone.
Choose anything: an object, animal, plant, machine, weather pattern, body part, or natural phenomenon. Describe it from the inside out. Let its physical reality guide the poem: its weight, surface, rhythm, sounds, habits, decay, memory.
You may lean into the surreal. Let the thing dream, contradict itself, remember what it should not remember, or behave in ways that defy logic. But keep the poem grounded in the thing’s material presence. The strangeness should emerge naturally from the object itself, not feel imposed upon it.
Do not explain what the thing symbolizes. Let the thing be the meaning.
Guidelines
- Stay rooted in concrete imagery and sensory detail
- Avoid abstract explanation whenever possible
- Surreal elements are welcome if they grow organically from the thing itself
- Free verse or rhyme are both welcome
- 10–20 lines
Tips
- Try not to name the thing’s symbolic meaning directly; let the reader discover it through the experience of the poem
- For an example of the form, see Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther”
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
After studying the guidelines and reading a little about Rainer Maria Rilke, I wrote On Its Nail. I hope you enjoy what I came up with.
On Its Nail
it
hangs blank
from its nail
on the wall
a
click
of a switch
and
it is face
to face
with a face
with an itch
leaning in
the mouth opens wide
cavernous
breath
fogs reflections
of so many faces
it dreams of sunlit dew
slipping into a silvered stream
—Lesley Scoble, May 2026
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to Hope / Srijita for her brilliant dinggedicht prompt.
My thanks, as always, to David for his constant encouragement and enthusiasm.
And most of all, my thanks to you, the reader, for spending this time with me.
LesleyScoble.com 
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