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:
NOTE THESE CHANGES IN THE POETRY FRIDAY HOSTING SCHEDULE: Heidi and Margaret are changing places, so Heidi will now host on August 15, and Margaret will host on September 5.
Image from the front page of The Burlington (CO) Record
I thought I was writing this poem to the photo that appeared on the front page my hometown newspaper, but as it turns out, the poem also has echoes in an extraordinary book that I finished just last night. THE ANTIDOTE by Karen Russell is set in Nebraska in 1935 between two cataclysmic environmental events: the Black Sunday dust storm and the flooding of the Republican River (24 inches of rain in 24 hours). So it’s a story of the land, but inseparably, it’s a story about the people there. Here’s how Russell (with James Riding In) describes what she attempted to do in THE ANTIDOTE:
THE ANTIDOTE uses fantastical conceits to illuminate the holes in people’s private and collective memories, the willful omissions passed down generation to generation, and the myths that have been used by the U.S. government and White settlers to justify crimes against the citizens of Native Nations and the theft of Native lands.
It was a book that puzzled me at first, then fascinated me, then horrified me, then made me read the last hundred pages at a gallop (which is why I’m “late” posting), then ultimately left me with some measure of hope.
Which brings us back to the photo and the poem. I grew up at the edge of the same Pawnee lands in THE ANTIDOTE, in a part of the country where White farming techniques have resulted in loss of topsoil and the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. And I grew up with the myth of the noble (White) farmers, who toiled at the whim of the sparse rainfall and the destructive summer storms, and whose hope was what kept them going.
It’s time to tell the truth. All of it. And it’s time to listen to the land and agree to change the ruinous human part of our relationship with her. She wants to live, and she can heal, if we let her. If we help her.
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Marcie has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Marcie Flinchum Atkins. You can find there the Poetry Sisters who had the bandwidth to write to this month’s challenge, to write a sedoka, along with others who joined in the challenge.
PLEASE NOTE THESE CHANGES IN THE POETRY FRIDAY HOSTING SCHEDULE: Heidi and Margaret are changing places, so Heidi will now host on August 15, and Margaret will host on September 5.
The Poetry Sisters’ challenge this month was to write a raccontino, a poem that tells a story starting in the title and continuing in the end words of the odd-numbered lines of couplets that contain even-line rhymes. Not at all complicated. Oh, no. Not at all.
Did you try one? Did you start with the story and the rhyme-scheme (that was my method), or did you just write from your heart and knead that dough until it fit the form?
As with any challenge, after the gnashing of the teeth and the tearing of the hair, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.
Then I remembered our year-long sub-challenge of writing “in conversation.” Oops.
And yet, the unwritten text of the poem is steeped in human conversation — vetting two companies before we chose one, using Google Translate to communicate with the Brazilian Portuguese-speaking crew who did all the work — as well as in figurative conversations between noise and silence, destruction and repair.
Tanita has her poem, along with this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at {fiction, instead of lies}, and the rest of the sisters’ poems are here:
Next week, on Friday, July 4, please consider joining the Inklings in writing poems of protest for our nation’s birthday. Let’s use our voices and our art to make some noise! Feel free to write in praise of democracy and patriotism if you’re so moved, or write in frustration and befuddlement over the “leadership” in the White House and/or Congress and/or the courts and/or and/or and/or. The roundup will be here!
I missed the Poetry Sisters’ challenge last week because I was too deep inside the whirlwind of preparing for Ohio’s Casting for Recovery spring retreat (our first spring retreat and our first at our new “forever home”). It went REALLY well, in spite of the pouring rain on Friday. The weather cleared, lots of fish were caught and released, nature and laughter and the power of being SEEN by those who have shared like experiences gave us all a respite from The World.
To review, the Sisters were writing golden shovels using a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to NY” and trying our best to stick to our year-long theme of conversations. For the record, my poem was written in May, in time for the challenge. It just didn’t make it here.
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Fast forward to today, the Thursday before the first Friday of the month, which is when the Inklings share their responses to a member’s challenge. I came home from the retreat with piles of laundry and miscellaneous after-retreat tasks to prioritize, but also to the final full day of the replacement of siding and gutters (bam bam bam BAM BAM…then blessed silence when they finished), putting the yard and beds back in order (at least a pint of nails left behind on the ground), washing screens and windows outside (AJ) and vacuuming piles of dust that sifted in from the corners of every. single. window. (me), a blood draw and doctor’s appointment, book club, volunteer work, and teaching a clothing embellishment with embroidery class. Whew!
The Inklings challenge, was offered this month by Heidi:
Watch a few videos from the WE DO NOT CARE CLUB on Instagram or other platform.
Read some comments. Die laughing (or crying).
Write a poem that lists or explains some things that you as a woman no longer care ‘bout for whatever reason. It does not have to be because of peri/menopause. Try to replicate Melani’s deadpan delivery, if that’s possible in a poem. TWIST: include something that you DO care about, that requires you to make space by jettisoning some of the other stuff.
And now I don’t care that I didn’t manage to post my Sisters poem last week, because what a conversation that poem and today’s poem are having! What a conversation I’m hosting inside my head between my now-self and my then-self! Friends, it is beyond hard to rid yourself of the teachings you learned implicitly and explicitly from your mother and from society. We are all works in progress. It is never too late to start accepting yourself for who you are and others for who they are. Full stop.
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As Tanita mentioned in her post last week, the Poetry Sisters blew right past their monthly online work/gab session. Well, so did the Inklings. I’m not sure who’s posting, so I’ll let you find them in the roundup if they make it this week. A whole bunch of Life is happening this weekend for lots of them. Have fun, ladies!
Happy end of NPM! I, for one, am not sad to leave behind spotlighting the absolutely RIDICULOUS list of words the administration wants to ban from our vocabulary, businesses, universities, grant applications, etc. All of my poems can be found at Poetrepository.
Linda M. gave the Inklings their May challenge:
Whitney Hanson is a young poet who has caught my interest. She shares primarily on TikTok. Hanson offers poems that begin with, “in poetry we say…” In these poems, Hanson takes a common phrase we know in English and translates it poetically. Her newest book, In Poetry We Say…(self-published March 2025) is a writer’s journal full of invitations to respond to, “in poetry we say…”
I see an invitation to write in a few ways:
Find a poem that you love to show how poetry translates English in a new way Or,
Write poetry in a way that responds to the phrase, “in poetry we say…”
Go rogue and respond to Hanson’s poetry in any way that makes you happy
In a way, I met this challenge all month long in April, with the striking word of each acrostic the “in English we say” part of the invitation, and the actual acrostic the “in poetry we say” part. Looking back in my notebook, I found this draft from Laura S.’s February challenge, which seems like a fine companion to my April project AND an adequate response to Linda’s challenge.
In typography, the small space inside letters is called a counter.
A Count. Account.Counter.
I’m mapping all the words for what I’ll say twenty years from now. I consider their shapes, their volume, their urgency, even the nearly hidden space in each letter, known as the counter.
(c)Mary Lee Hahn, draft 2025
Here’s what the rest of the Inklings came up with, if life gave them the elbow room this month to write:
This NPM, I am writing acrostic poems using words from the Banned Words List at the Pen America Website. You can find my poems each day on Poetrepository, IG stories, and BlueSky.
But today is special. This is a Poetry Sister Challenge Day, and this month we are writing in conversation with a vintage photograph. I chose to have a conversation with my father as a young man, and ponder everything that happened in his life after that moment was captured, up to and including my very own now.
Every single one of the “banned” words on the Pen America list is ridiculous. The whole list is ridiculous. You can’t erase words; you can’t erase history. We ARE our history. We exist. And we will keep talking about all of it. We will keep making art about and with all of it. Here’s mine so far:
This NPM, I am writing acrostic poems using words from the Banned Words List at the Pen America Website. You can find my poems each day on Poetrepository, IG stories, and BlueSky.
This NPM, I am writing acrostic poems using words from the Banned Words List at the Pen America Website. You can find my poems each day on Poetrepository, IG stories, and BlueSky.
This NPM, I am writing acrostic poems using words from the Banned Words List at the Pen America Website. You can find my poems each day on Poetrepository, IG stories, and BlueSky.
Today, April 4, is an Inklings challenge day. Margaret invited us to try a Shadorma, a Spanish 6-line syllabic poem of 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllable lines respectively. So today’s poem, “Biases,” is a Shadorm-acrostic!
Here’s what the rest of the Inklings came up with, if life gave them the elbow room this month to write:
A(nother) Year of Reading 