Author: maryleehahn

Poetry Friday: Overheard

OVERHEARD AT NCTE

Begin with gratitude.1
Center joy.2

Place is where stories start.3
You write yourself into existence.4

If you don’t know where you are
you probably don’t know who you are.5

Black poetry is light in darkness

                            hope

                            soul food

                            legacy.6

There is no wrong way to be a writer.7
We can bend the characters–they won’t break.8
Creativity is combinatory.9

Learning should be a collective.10
In relationships and connections we find meaning.11

We learn from reading.12
Characters inspire us and make us brave.13

Reading is the most subversive thing we can do.14

Overhead and Remixed by Mary Lee Hahn, 2025

This post is my contribution to the Poetry Sisters’ challenge to write an “overheard” poem. For my overheard, I used my notes from NCTE, and in the image you can see my away-from-home-no-laptop process. It was fun to go back to the basics/old school. After I drafted in my notebook and did the cut-and-paste recombination, I began my post on my phone and a whole new learning curve emerged: how to format! Thank goodness I can at least bumble in html. 

Edited to add a link to the roundup at Buffy’s blog. Only a couple of the Poetry Sisters managed a post this month, what with NCTE and Life and All. You can find them on the roundup. Edited also to add the sources for each of my quotes.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

  1. Robin Wall Kimmerer ↩︎
  2. Katie Papesh ↩︎
  3. Mahogany Browne ↩︎
  4. Allan Wolf ↩︎
  5. Ralph Ellison, quoted by Gretchen Schroeder ↩︎
  6. panel with Nikki Grimes and Carol Boston Weatherford ↩︎
  7. Liz Garton Scanlon ↩︎
  8. Scott Snyder ↩︎
  9. Jason Chin ↩︎
  10. Stella Villalba ↩︎
  11. Jason Chin ↩︎
  12. Katie Wood Ray ↩︎
  13. Scott Snyder ↩︎
  14. Percival Everett ↩︎

Poetry Friday: Don’t Obey

After seeing millions of views and shares of his 'Portland Frog' art, Nikkolas Smith decided to draw our Chicken guy and more!
byu/kenistod inPortland

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Today’s poetry challenge came from Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti. The inspiration and mentor text was Donika Kelly’s  “Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things” . Susan’s response to her own challenge is here. This was so much fun! I can’t wait to see what others came up with!

Carol has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup is at The Apples in My Orchard.

Poetry Friday: On the Menu

Linda’s prompt for the Inkings challenge this month comes from Ethical ELA’s September Open Write by Kelsey Bigelow: “What is the happiest thing you’ve ever tasted?”

In brainstorming for the poem, I unearthed a memory of racing to the DQ to get a cone for Dad, and making it home before it melted. Being able to make him happy was sweeter than my own butterscotch dip cone.

Same thing with the good luck dumplings Nai Nai serves before I fly back to Ohio from San Diego. They are so SO yummy, but the best part is her happiness.

Three or four elections ago I brought some Nerds Gummy Clusters to snack on through the long day and to share with my fellow roster judges. This has become a tradition which we were delighted to share with a new member of our team on Tuesday. He had never had them. The look on his face was priceless.

Today I went for a long walk and brainstormed ideas for this poem. I drank in the delicious blue of the sky and savored the crispy crunch under my feet as I walked. Pure Fall happiness! (And that MOON last night!)

Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:

Heidi @my juicy little universe
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone

Laura has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Laura Purdie Salas.

Poetry Friday: Burning Haibun

A child pyro with easy access to ashtrays. Smell of smoke ubiquitous. Mesmerized by flare and sulphurous flash. Burning matches held until fingers sting. Child pyro grows up in a world that burns, the sting now an ache, an ache of how and why that burns from the inside out while outside the smell of wet wood fire pit smoke pools in the low spot in the neighborhood and every breath brings an acrid blackness to lungs, even the trees forced to breathe the last gasp of their kin. Child pyro orphaned by lung cancers, never addicted, planting for possibility in a future free from fire.

A child mesmerized by
flare and flash
grows up 
outside
in the neighborhood,
the trees their kin,
possibility a future fire.

a flare grows –
up in the trees
fire

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2025

What a doozy of a Poetry Sisters Challenge this month! The Poetry Foundation article about this form (invented by poet torrin a. greathouse) states:

A burning haibun must be composed of three (or more) parts—an initial prose poem, an erasure of that prose poem, and an erasure of the previous erasure down to a haiku. Additional segments of erasure may be integrated, but keep in mind the continuity of the piece.

The erasures are intended to be sequential and persistent. Once a piece of text has been blacked out, or burned away, it should not return. Furthermore, each erasure should represent some form of reorientation from the previous section, altering the meaning, tone, etcetera.

The focus of a burning haibun—in contrast to traditional haibun—should be on an interior landscape, by which I mean the landscape of memory. Though the form emerged from a meditation upon the contours of traumatic memory, you should by no means feel confined to writing within that space.

Somewhere within the poem’s text, something must burn.

What the Poetry Foundation doesn’t state is how tricky these are to write! Do you start with a mind-dump that becomes some kind of prose poem (whatever that is) that gets burned up as sequentially as the above quote would have you believe? Or do you start with a haiku and reverse-engineer the whole thing? Or do you write a paragraph, make it as weird as possible so as to seem like a prose poem, then pull a haiku out, go back and burn up the middle section, only to realize when you go to make the images for your post that you have broken the rules by using words you burned in the middle section for your haiku and have to start over again with the second two parts? (You might infer which of these processes was mine…)

I can’t wait to see what the other Poetry Sisters created!

Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon

Jone has this week’s Halloween Poetry Friday roundup at Jone Rush MacCulloch.

The fire in my images is via Unsplash.

Poetry Friday: Aimlessly in Love

Do you subscribe to George Bilgere’s poem-a-day newsletter? I’m a big fan of Bilgere’s poetry. I even wrote a poem after hearing him speak in 2012. (Gads, that’s a long time ago now…and the link will probably tell you that Poetrepository is not a secure site. I won’t be offended if you don’t click through.)

Back to the newsletter. I’m a big fan of George Bilgere’s poetry, and, as it turns out, I quite like most every poem he chooses for his newsletter. His small musing that comes with each poem often makes me chuckle and sometimes makes me go back to the poem and read again.

Today, George wrote, “Sometimes you just feel like reading a Billy Collins poem, in the same way that sometimes it’s nice to take a walk in the woods on a glorious fall day.” And he was right. May we all live with our heart

“propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.“

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Aimless Love
by Billy Collins

This morning as I walked along the lake shore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The rest of the poem is here.

Patricia has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Reverie.

Poetry Friday: It’s Time

Art by sisters Maizy S. and Marcella S.

I’m here with another poem in conversation with art created by two young and talented artists, the daughters of a talented, passionate maker of a mom. No surprise that these two girls have a wealth of supplies and encouragement from both parents. They are thriving — learning to boldly make their marks and trust their own visions. What a world they will make for us! What a world the ARE making for us! They give me hope for the future, a hope as green as both the heart and the landscape.

Sarah Grace has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Sarah Grace Tuttle.

Poetry Friday: Double Duty Again

Have you seen Joyce Sidman’s new book? Her clever poems (and Melissa Sweet’s always-fantastic illustrations) just beg for you to write your own Letter Poems To Friends.

So I did!

This is also Inklings Challenge week, and we were given a generously soft challenge from Margaret:

Image Poetry: exchange an image with your partner and write an image poem using a small poem form (15 words, elfchen, haiku, shadorma, etc.).

I traded images with Linda Mitchell. She sent me three from which to choose. Each had so much possibility, but I couldn’t NOT write from this one. I also couldn’t NOT write Letter Poems To Friends, so the “small poem form” part of the challenge got lost, but…THIS PICTURE!! and Joyce Sidman’s mentor texts!!! I know all will be forgiven.

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Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:

Heidi @my juicy little universe
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone

Matt has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.

Poetry Friday: Tritina

Art by E.F.

It’s been a minute, and I’m glad to be back! I missed this Poetry Friday community and the ritual of the weekly sharing of poetry.

I wrote this poem with two purposes in mind. First of all, my niece sent the beautiful artwork that illustrates my poem. To honor her gift, I wanted to write a poem in response. Secondly, this is Poetry Sister challenge week. So I wrote a tritina. As Cousin Tanita describes, “this less restrictive younger sibling of the sestina uses three repeated words to end three tercets. The order of word-endings for the tercets are 123, 312, 231, with a final line acting as the envoi, featuring all three words in the 1-2-3 order used in the first stanza. Additionally, we’ll continuing with our theme of poetry in conversation, in whatever way that is individually defined.” My poem is in conversation with E’s artwork.

I’m not sure how many of the Sisters will be able to join in this week, but here they are just in case:

Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon

Amy has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at The Poem Farm.

Poetry Friday: August

It’s highly ironic that this is the poem I’m sharing today…a cloudy, cool, drizzly-morning day with the windows open all day long. Suffice it to say, this poem is a highly accurate representation of the August we were experiencing when I wrote it!

I’m taking a blog break until September 26 when I’m planning to be back for the Poetry Sisters challenge. Happy September! See you on the other side!

Carol has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Beyond LiteracyLink.