Poetry Sisters Write Etherees

This month's challenge was to write in the form of the etheree. An etheree is a poem of ten lines in which each line contains one more syllable than the last. Beginning with one syllable and ending with ten, this unrhymed form is named for its creator, 20th-century American poet Etheree Taylor Armstrong.

Variant forms of the etheree include the reverse form, which begins with 10 syllables and ends with one. The double etheree is twenty lines, moving from 1 syllable to 10, and then from 10 back to one. (I suppose a double etheree could also move from 10 syllables to 1, and then from one back to 10.)

You can learn more about the etheree at The Poets Garret and Shadow Poetry.

Since our theme for the year is transformation, I tried to think through topics that would lend themselves to the building structure of the etheree. I settled on alchemy. Here's what I came up with.

Alchemy 

What

magic

power lives

in this base stone

that channels water,

fire, air, and earth to make

transmutation possible

some call it sorcery, changing

lead to gold, nature and elements

altered through alchemy's mystical art

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

You can read the pieces written by my Poetry Sisters at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Kelly Ramsdell
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon
• Andi Sibley

Would you like to try the next challenge? Next month we are writing in the style of Neruda. Pick a poem you like and use it as inspiration for a poem of your own. We are still working on the theme of transformation, so perhaps you can squeeze this into your poem. We hope you'll join us. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on April 28th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We look forward to reading your poems!  

I hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Mary Lee Hahn at A(nother) Year of Reading. Happy poetry Friday, friends!