It’s the first Friday of the month, so it’s time for another Inkling challenge. This month, Molly challenged us to “Pick a poetry form you’ve been wanting to try and haven’t, and dive in!  Here are a few that I’ve been wanting to play around with:: Clogyrnach and Rondelet (thanks and thanks, Alan!), and Tricube (thanks, Matt!), and Magic 9 , Feel free to choose any form you’d like., or more than one.. No pressure. Just play!”

I decided to play with a Tricube. This form sounds straightforward: three stanzas with three lines, each line with three syllables. As Matt mentioned in his original post, though, the trick is getting “what you’re trying to say in that tiny space!”

After many false starts and playing with many different ideas, this is what I came up with.

How to Write a Poem

Gather thoughts.
Collect words.
Write them down.

Count, count, count.
Read aloud.
Rearrange.

Read again.
Satisfied?
Share your heart.

Draft, © Catherine Flynn, 2021

Please visit my fellow Inklings to find out what forms they decided to play with:

Linda@A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Margaret@Reflections on the Teche
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading

Then head over to Michelle Kogan’s blog for the Poetry Friday Roundup!

“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious.”
~ Lisel Muller ~

Earlier this week, I found myself standing in the kitchen of my grandmother’s house. I grew up next door to her and spent countless hours with her there. When my grandmother died, her house was sold and the new owners renovated the house. What now stands on that corner is almost unrecognizable, both inside and out. It was a bit surreal to be in a place that was once so familiar but is now utterly foreign. Right after this experience, I came across the above quote on The Marginalia (formerly Brain Pickings) and this Golden Shovel basically wrote itself.

Please be sure to visit Matt Forrest Esenwine at Radio, Rhythm, and Rhyme for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

This month, Linda challenged the Inklings to write “write a poem that includes the idea of percentage./percent. Percentages are all around us in recipes, prices, assessments, statistics. Include the idea of percentage in your poem.. In some way.”

During the approximately 1% of my life that I could actually sit down and write last month, I had an idea about writing a series of pi poems–poems using the sequence of pi (3.14159…) for either the word count or syllable count per line. This idea was a bit misguided, as I thought pi was a percentage. In fact, as Mary Lee reminded me, it is a ratio. Math was never my strongest subject.

Linda also inspired me with her brilliant idea to write to the #inktober prompts using images she found on Wikiart. There were several similar prompts on Instagram last month, including #theydrawtober and #birdtober, where “Goose” was the bird listed one day. Search results on Wikiart didn’t appeal to me, so I checked Google Arts & Culture, where I found this stunning quilt:

I come from a long line of quilters. Once upon a time, I had grand ambitions of creating my own quilts. Now I write poems instead. (The similarities between the two arts are not lost on me; maybe I’ll write about that one day.) Here is the poem that emerged from this jumble of thoughts.

Fat quarters nestle,
forgotten
in a dresser drawer
hoping
to be released, snipped, stitched,
flocked, then sent off on a wild goose chase.

Draft, © 2021, Catherine Flynn

I promise it won’t be a wild goose chase if you visit my fellow Inklings to read their percentage poems:

Linda@A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly@Nix the Comfort Zone
Margaret@Reflections on the Teche
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading

Mary Lee is also hosting this week, so you’ll find all sorts of poetry goodness there.

To every year the trees grew without us noticing.
Hannah Marshall

In the introduction to  The Best American Poetry 2021, Tracy K. Smith states that “the best poems of 2020 reached me as offerings of desperately needed hope and endurance.” She goes on to say that “the best poetry to emerge during a bitter year sprang from whatever else was indispensable to sustenance, peace of mind, justice, and healing at the time.”

Indispensable to sustenance.

That we are still in search of “desperately needed hope and endurance” is enough to drive one to despair. And yet.

One of the poems included in this year’s collection is “This Is a Love Poem to Trees,” by Hannah Marshall. I couldn’t find Marshall’s poem online, but I encourage you to seek it out. Trees have sustained me in countless ways, not just over the past twenty months, but throughout my entire life. Here are two haiku, love songs to two of my favorite trees.

late afternoon light
leaves dappled amber and gold
sips of sustenance

crowned in green cumulus puffs,
maple bears witness
the world barrels past

Draft © Catherine Flynn, 2021

Please be sure to visit Irene Latham at Live Your Poem for the Poetry Friday Roundup.