GloPoWriMo Day 7 - counting-in rhyme

 

Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a middle grade book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree drafts this month. 

APR 7 In her poem, “Front Yard Rhyme,” Cecily Parks evokes the sing-songy beats that accompany girls’ clapping games, and jump-rope and skipping rhymes. Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that emulates these songs – something to snap, clap, and jump around to.

https://www.napowrimo.net/

Tree Rounds

one tree, two tree, three tree, four

follow the path that starts at your door

beech tree, maple tree, willow tree, oak

pedal your bike, spin your spokes

magnolia, laburnum, tulip, yew

leaf, twig, branch, trunk, rumpled roots

find something, take something, acorn, nut

give something, anything–you’ll know what

draft ©HM 2026

GloPoWriMo Day 6 - a conversation

 

Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a middle grade book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree drafts this month. 

APR 6

In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream, after Yentl van Stokkum's It’s the Warmest Summer on Record Babe.”

On the day this tree tells me its name it's not a dream

We know each other quite well now–we first met when I fell off the bus one afternoon, scraped my knee, waited for the bus to pull away and then limped over to sit and lean against it, throbbing with embarrassment. 

–I think only the bus driver noticed–said the tree, a towering southern magnolia.

--You think?--I said, catching a sob.

--Actually I know. It’s one of the powers of the Grandiflora.-- 

I had to know about the powers of this magnolia tree, I asked a dozen questions but not its name. I though it was called simply Grandiflora, that all similar trees shared this name, so a year later as I was using its untrimmed lower branches to hoist myself into the cool of its leathery leafcladding, I was surprised when it asked my name.

–What’s your name? You visit often but you’ve never introduced yourself.--

–I like to be called Sylvie,– I answered–but that’s not my real name. Is Grandiflora your real name?--

–My real name is Cerolia, and I’m not an it. I’m a we.--

–A “we”?--

–Most trees call themselves we. It’s the royal We, certainly, but also the plural we:

many branches, many leaves, many seeds, many offspring. You humans could be we too.--

–I see what you mean,-- I said, –so we are called Sylvie and you-plural are called Cerolia.--

–We are pleased to finally know your name, Sylvie.--

And Cerolia shook their waxy green, rust-lined leaves around us like laughing.

GloPoWriMo Day 4 -

Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a middle grade book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree drafts this month. 

APR 4

In his poem, “Spring Thunder,” Mark van Doren brings us a short, haunting evocation of weather and the change in seasons. Today, we’d like to challenge you to craft your own short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.

Front Porch

Early warm and dark, 

every bird in the world cries hark, 

only me here 

to see full moon set near, just

behind oak, beyond clouds;

the nectar is loud–

redbud and dogwood, 

bees before dawn,

pink and green cream, 

spring stretches and yawns.

draft ©HM 2026

national poetry month 2026 - why are we here? what are we about?

Greetings to all who pass here on this Poetry Friday! (Orientation at this link.) 

On this ball of confusion that is the human world, Nature persists in doing her dependable gorgeous thing, offering us all the reasons we need to do our dependable gorgeous thing as poets. What, you may ask, is that thing, exactly?

Today you will receive answers! Not one definitive answer, but many possible answers, as Linda has offered the Inklings critique group this challenge for the first Friday in April (borrowing from the Poetry Foundation): "Write an...

• Ars Poetica

• A poem that explains the “art of poetry,” or a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem. Horace’s Ars Poetica is an early example, and the foundation for the tradition. While Horace writes of the importance of delighting and instructing audiences, many modernist ars poetica poets argue that poems should be written for their own sake, as art for the sake of art. Archibald MacLeish’s famous “Ars Poetica” sums up the argument: “A poem should not mean / But be.” (Poetry Foundation)

I thought of writing a new piece for this challenge, but knew that I had several already drafted to choose from (who among us has not contemplated the point of it all?), so I trawled my catalog and chose one to revise and update.  Plus I'm sharing a bonus type of one for kids that was published long ago in Sylvia Vardell's Booklinks column!  In both cases, I'm not about telling you what a poem SHOULD do, like Archibald MacLeish, but more about suggesting what a poet is TRYING to do, what a poem COULD do, COULD mean. In the first I imagine poets as engineers of a kind, as magicians, as day laborers, as movers.

In this one, poets are bakers, potters, cooks.

If I had to use fewer words, though, I'd just defer to our glorious, mysterious dead friend Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant---

And now, here are links to my fellow Inklings' blogs, so you can see what they think the art of the poem is, and let's go and see what's brewing with the Progressive Poem, too! Thanks to Tabatha and Cathy; catch up here at Patricia's blog.

Catherine @Reading to the Core
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche

Thanks to our host for today, Matt at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme, who's celebrating a shiny year for  A UNIVERSE OF RAINBOWS!  I'm delighted to say that I'll take my turn to host on April 17, with highlights from a conversation called "We Teach Poetry" that I held yesterday with Jone Rush MacCulloch and Margaret Simon. We entertained and educated each other greatly on Zoom, and I'm really looking forward to sharing some of our favorite approaches to teaching poetry to kids, why we think it's important in the first place, and how writing with kids sustains and inspires us. Don't miss it!

Finally, an extra bonus bonus: I found this poem at Jama's Alphabet Soup, featured back in 2021. What a fantastic ars poetica by a British poetry star, Carol Ann Duffy! (And it's a very British poem indeed.) 

THE WORDS OF POEMS by Carol Ann Duffy

GloPoWriMo 3 - vocation

Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a middle grade book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree drafts this month. 

APR 3

In his poem, “Treasure Hunt,” Prabodh Parikh brings us a refreshingly different view of what being a poet is like – that is, if you grew up on the cultural notion of poets being wan and ethereal, or ill and doomed. Parikh’s boisterous pirate of a poet might be an “unreliable” character, but seems like he’d be the life of any party, and quite satisfied with his existence. Today, we challenge you to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be. Perhaps your poem will feature a very relaxed brain surgeon, or a farmer that hates vegetables. Or maybe you have a poetical alter-ego of your own, who flies a non-wan, treasure-hunting flag with pride.

https://www.napowrimo.net/

************

People think I’m just a kid tooling around on my bike on my way to the pool

or the library. They have trouble imagining the truth: I am not playing, I’m

working. This is my calling, my profession. Visiting each tree, observing, noting, 

drawing, composing watching through the seasons, learning some botany. I’m

inexperienced but I’m serious.

draft ©HM 2026

“HALF OF THEM DON’T EVEN HAVE A PROFESSION,” Harriet, who considers espionage her calling, writes of her sixth-grade cohort. When her mother accuses her of “playing” with her notebook, Harriet snaps, “Who says I’m playing? I’m WORKING!” Mrs. Welsch tries to clarify that schoolwork, not spying, is Harriet’s work.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-tragic-misfit-behind-harriet-the-spy

GloPoWriMo Day 2 - after Ellen Bryant Voigt

Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree poems this month. Prompt #2:

In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

what am I after?

it’s a kingdom–

no, a queendom–

no, I don’t want to be a monarch or even a painted lady; I’m more like a cabbage white,

nondescript but striking in its way, with the flipsy lilting power to make my own way from plant to plant, from tree to tree, and notice how I fly by solitary, I don’t consult, I leave and go, I come back and my wings become just two of many hands, ears, lashed eyes, lunged tongues flapping at the dinner table and I belong there, and also out here alone between the trees,

sovereign.

draft ©HM 2026

P.S. It's my first time participating in Glo/NaPoWriMo and I have just discovered that it's a very grass-rootsy kind of thing hosted by a lil' old poet called Maureen Thorson (actually I don't think she's very old) and I'm grateful.

GloPoWriMo Day 1 - tree tanka

HAPPY NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!

(and one of my last posts here on Blogger...I'm moving over to Substack this April)

This year I'm leaning into the Global version of National Poetry Writing Month, in the spirit of international connection and cooperation between what we are increasingly encouraged to think of as Us and Them (but of course we're all pink on the inside). I'm particularly going to be searching out poets of the UK and Ireland, in preparation for joining that community starting in September when my spouse and I will relocate for the academic year to Brighton, in order to be closer to her family. The poets.org poster for this year seems to know something of our efforts to pull a sword from that particular geographic stone! (I have a variety of feelings about this image, by the way; I wonder what you make of this typography, color choices, featured character, references, etc etc?)

Each day the folks at NaPoWriMo are offering a prompt, and I'll start there and see what happens. I'm using my daily drafts to work on a book with the working title of TREEOGRAPHY, so there will be a lot of tree poems this month. The first prompt was a tanka.

tree tanka

like lampposts standing

in a snowy wood, each tree

lights a different verge

of my realm: a starting point,

a green-edged destination

draft ©HM 2026

And I'm off!

becoming

Greeting. (typo but hee hee apparently I only have time today for a single greeting) 

This week is becoming a little less frantic as the weekend approaches, but at this very moment...it's still frantic.   Hence, a very light swing at the March challenge set for the Inklings by Margaret:

"Taking inspiration from this poem posted for Jacqueline Woodson’s birthday https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58421/on-paper, write a poem (any form or free verse) using the word becoming."

And even that I couldn't quite manage!

Become

to be

come knocking

to be
come in

to be
come closer

come on now

come clean

to be

come as you are

come a come a

come as chameleon

come out, come out

whoever you are

to be

come out of the blue

come out of your shell

come out in the wash

to be

come quietly

come in small packages

to be 

come to grief

come rain or come shine

come hell or high water

to be

come out of left field

come out swinging

come at me

to be

come to your senses

come to a head

to be

come back from the brink

come to a conclusion

come home

become

draft (c) HM 2026

What I want to know is, did Jacqueline Woodson know this poem from SING A SONG OF POPCORN (1988), or is this becoming yourself through writing a universal, expressible in myriad ways?

Thanks to our hostess today, Karen Edmisten, who graces us with an original poem (a treat rarer than I for one would like!).  SPRING FORWARD with hope, fortitude and longanimity, everyone!

it's no one's (and everyone's) fault

Greetings all--late post to offer more detail on the Fault Line poem form that Mary Lee used in her Poetry Sisters/Arthur Sze poem today.  Over in Laura Shovan's February Poetry Project, a prompt about "What Lies Beneath?" the reminded me of a poem I wrote 2020 that kind of created itself. I don't think it exists as a known, named form (although it's similar to some you all know), so I'm trying to define it. Here's my working description:

A fault line poem contains a hidden line running beneath its surface — not in the first letters like an acrostic, or in end-words like a golden shovel, but in the fractures between words. The hidden line is built from edges rubbing together across rifts: the ending of one word, the beginning of another, or both combined. Whole words of the “landscape” poem may also be used. The result should be a smaller poem buried in the landscape poem, like a geological fault hidden beneath stable ground. Perhaps stepping close to it creates a vertiginous feeling of risk, or revelation.

The hidden line can be marked typographically (bold, italics, small caps) for those who want to show the fault line clearly as in my poem below, or left entirely concealed.

The reveal of the fault line at the end, like the haiku that ends a haibun, invites the reader to reconsider the formerly stable ground they were standing on from a new perspective.

To construct one: Begin with the line you want to hide---or don’t, and let the two intertwined pieces develop simultaneously! Either way, you’ll build the poem outward from it, choosing words whose edges, pressed together, yield the words of your hidden text in sequence. The poem must stand on its own — the fault line should be barely visible until the reader falls into it.

I'm posting the original fault line, called "Elves Chasm, Grand Canyon," and then another that I wrote, much shorter. 

On the Edge

Show me another gray day

and I’ll surrender, start scanning the 

cold, wet landscape for a way out. 

I’ll climb a bridge and stand, swaying,

trying to judge how many feet I’d fall, if I’d 

hit hard enough. Who can take any more

of this gnawing, windy winter?

How can we stand 

any more winter?

Thanks to Margaret for hosting today--I won't get around to much commenting this weekend, but I thought I oughta share!

somewhere waiting

So many of us are grateful to Susan Thomsen (and OG Poetry Fridayer) for inviting us to participate with her in responding to a poetry prompt mentioned by David Lehman in his intro to The Best American Poetry 2025: to write a short poem starting with the final line of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: 

                                                            “I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

She's hosting today at Chicken Spaghetti and I have this to share--looking forward to all the stoppings, all the somewheres!

I stop somewhere waiting for you

It’s unclear where I've stopped
or who you’ll be, but I’m ready to settle
here, in a pool of shade or a beam of sun, 
with you.

It’s hard to know how it will happen.

You may emerge from a dressing room,
turning before the mirror in a new striped sweater,
dragging your eyes across mine, deliberate.

Or I may rush from my park bench to chase
you with the glove you just dropped.

You may stand just before me in line
to buy popcorn for the movie, the movie
we’re both seeing alone.

Or I may step into a repurposed phone booth
and dial 0, and you’ll be the stranger who picks up
in some faraway city.

I stop here, somewhere, waiting for you,
waiting to fall in love with someone

I’ve never met.

draft ©HM 2026

what if

Greetings, Poetry People. It's the third Friday of the month and thus Climate Friday here at mjlu. I think I need to write a love poem for February, a love poem to possibility, a love poem to the planet. It's kind of a poet's First Job, isn't it? And you can say that planet poems are a dime a dozen, but that doesn't make the practice or the product any less valuable, now does it? I don't think so, at least.

The Medicine

What if the thermometer itself froze solid 
and the people linked arms and sang in solidarity with the cold?

What if the mercury crossed the endline of 32*
and the crowd of birds and squirrels went wild cheering the runoff?

What if the far-north ice patches receded,
revealing the darts of forebears who shopped at the caribou market? 

What if snow fell "quietly, quietly, leaving nothing out,"
and we each found our one job and did it thoroughly, faithfully?

What if the sun shone, ceaselessly dependable,
and to a person we built a photovoltaic prayer for the future?

What if indoors the gullible daffodils bloomed
and outdoors the bulbs underground kept counting the sunrise?

What if the currents of the wind changed,
and we packed our carpet bags, put up our umbrellas and sailed

to our next appointment, where once again
through elbow grease and a spoonful of sugar we reconnected
                                            all the members of the earthly family?

Instadraft (c) HM 2026

Greeting also to the ever-artful Robyn Hood Black, who is HERE for us in so many ways, topmost as our roundup host today.  Thanks, Robyn, and to you and any others who may not know them, check out

HERE: Poems for the Planet (an anthology) and

YOU ARE HERE: Poetry in the Natural World (Ada Limon's Laureate project)

brief and to the gentle point

Merry February, everyone. There are lots of ways of giving advice: in the form of a command, by demonstration, through constant nagging or subtle suggestion, precisely with details, broadly with general encouragement. For this month's Inklings Challenge, Molly (also our host today!) offered us a prompt she found among those at Audrey Gidman's December Poetry Advent Calendar. It reads:

Write a poem after Wendell Berry’s “Like Snow” — word for word. Choose a subject: rain, a butterfly, granite, the ocean, anything. Berry’s poem is three lines long. Break down each line. In line one, replace the word “suppose” with something else: what if; in spite of; imagine etc., replace the pronoun and the verb, replace “snow” with your chosen subject. Do the same with the second and third lines. Be sure to write an epigraph that reads “after Wendell Berry."

To that Molly added advice in the form of permissions: "I'm not sure if this is easy or not, but it is short! I'd also add that you can just be inspired by this poem and not go word for word in your substitution. Or go rogue and feel free to interpret the prompt in any way that you want! Write about snow! Get inspired by another Wendell Berry poem! Or even choose a totally different prompt from the list."

And then, interestingly, Berry's poem is a kind of advisement, quite gentle; musing, even; a conjecture:

                    LIKE SNOW

Suppose we did our work

like the snow, quietly, quietly,

leaving nothing out.

            —Wendell Berry from “Leavings,” (Counterpoint, 2009)

What if indeed we did our one job, just that thoroughly, humbly, and then...were done with it? How might that change things? I found it a soothing challenge to transform Wendell's nugget of wisdom into something of my own. 

                       Like Progress

       after Wendell Berry

Suppose we flowed forward

like the path, curvingly, curvingly,

leaving straight lines by the wayside.

              draft ©HM 2026

What if indeed our progress is not fighting but flowing, is not a road but a path, is not straight and smooth but curved and not always clearly visible, and requires us to leave some of our driving behind? (Oh yeah: longanimity.) Sometimes you write the poem you yourself need without realizing it until ten days later. Also, didn't someone once say that "the personal is political"?

Furthermore, on the topics of snow and advice, here's a poem from this time last year, before I knew of Wendell's poem....

Many thank to Molly for her choice of prompt, and for hosting us today! Check out the takes of all the Inklings below.
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche