This is December, as much or more than decorations and presents. This, plus oak leaves scuttling across a crust of snow, the dark silhouettes of winter trees, and heavy purple clouds hinting at the possibility of more snow later.
Linda has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at A Word Edgewise.
Interested in hosting a Poetry Friday roundup in January – June 2026? There are still spaces available! The signup is here.
(Junco photo via Unsplash.)
The Inklings challenge for this month came from Heidi, who encouraged us to write a poem of address to an article of clothing. After auditioning several ideas, I settled on my old friend Barn Coat. We’ve been through many winters together, and I know we’ve got many more yet to go.
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Catherine @Reading to the Core
Irene has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Live Your Poem.
Interested in hosting a Poetry Friday roundup in January – June 2026? The signup is here.
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good to know that the poems will always be there, waiting, no matter what gets in their way!
Linda B. has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at TeacherDance. Go find out what the Dickens she’s up to!
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.
.
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.
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.
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.
A(nother) Year of Reading 