Poetry Sisters Unravel the Ovillejo

 Tanita set this month's challenge to write an ovillejo. Here's a bit of information about this form:

"…the “ovillejo,” an old Spanish verse form that means “tight little bundle.” “-ejo” is one of our blessed diminutives, and “ovillo” means “tangled ball of yarn.” The last line is a “redondilla,” a “little round” that collects all three of the short lines. The rhyme scheme is established, but the meter is at the poet’s discretion, although in Spanish the longer lines tend to be octosyllabic (8 syllables)."

Some sites suggest lines 1, 3, and 5 should ask a question and that lines 2, 4, and 6 answer them. Other sites suggest a pattern of a long line followed by a short line. The best description I found was at the site Astra Poetica.

I tried several of these variations, always beginning with the last line and working backwards. I'm not particularly happy with these and recognize that I need to play a bit more with them, but I do have two drafts to share. 

This first poem uses a favorite line from the poem I wrote last month. The second uses a portion of a Mary Oliver quotation.

A Whale Breaches

Far from the beaches

a whale breaches 

beauty in motion

and the ocean 

fond of sleeping late

forgets its weight

a cargo ship hauls its freight

crew on the bridge navigate by degrees

unseen by creatures beneath the seas

a whale breaches and the ocean forgets its weight

Ovillejo for a Poem

We write our truth and listen to the birds

poems are not words

they're lyrics for the choir

but fires

burn and crackle, too hot to hold 

for the cold

melts in flames of red, and blue, and gold

we speak the truth so every soul is heard

we light the dark so hidden selves are stirred—

poems are not words, but fires for the cold

Poems ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2026. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems my Poetry Sisters have written at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? Next month, we're writing ekphrastic poems. You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on April 24th 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 Marcie Flinchum Atkins. Happy poetry Friday! 

Poetry Sisters Write to an Arthur Sze Poem

This month's challenge was to write a poem inspired by or in conversation with one by our current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze. I have to admit I'd never read any of his poetry, so in preparation for our Zoom meeting on Sunday, I spent quite a bit of time reading his work. Once I got deep into his work, I was then faced with the hard decision of choosing just one.

I finally selected the poem "Here." This is how it begins.

Here
by Arthur Sze

Here a snail on a wet leaf shivers and dreams of spring.
Here a green iris in December.
Here the topaz light of the sky.
Here one stops hearing a twig break and listens for deer.

Click here to read the poem in its entirety.

Instead of writing in response to the poem, I chose to use it as a mentor text. I put the lines of the poem on one side of a table, and then wrote lines in a similar style on the other side. I thought about starting my lines with the word "there," but instead went with "when."

Here's my poem, heavily inspired by Here.

When
When a snail grips the cold lip of a leaf and remembers warmth.
When a purple crocus insists on opening in January.
When the sky tilts and spills a thin copper light.
When you stop identifying sounds and listen for what moves between them.
When the craft of the ventriloquist lets silence speak.
When a pocket fills with stolen paper clips.
When the half-truth of an alibi almost believes itself.
When you step into an abandoned church and hear the whispers of a hymn.
When a dream of teeth and fur stills a body.
When a whale breaks the surface and the ocean forgets its weight.
When a motor dies and one oar and persistence are enough.
When tears flow on stage instead of lines.
When prayer becomes a posture rather than a plea.
When a palm holds feathers, shells, pebbles, seeds.
When fear sharpens everything it touches.
When you long for omniscience but find clarity and stillness.
When you live fully in the world.

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2026. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems my Poetry Sisters have written at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? We're tackling the poetic form of the ovillejo. You can learn more about this form at Writer's Digest. You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on March 27th 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 Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche. Happy poetry Friday! 

Poetry Sisters Write TriCubes

Phillip Larrea is an American poet and syndicated columnist. He invented a poetic form he calls TriCubes. Tricubes are poems composed of three stanzas, each containing three lines of three syllables. This was the form my poetry sisters and I took on as this month's challenge.

This year, we have no theme to hang our poems on, so we are free to write on any topic. I began by drafting poems related to the lunar new year. Then I turned to the snow, my dog, and baking. The biggest hurdle in writing these poems was making them sound and feel poetic. Three-syllable lines are a challenge. I liked what some of the drafts were trying to do, but they felt choppy and unfinished. I finally turned to writing a series of three-syllable lines on related topics and tried to rearrange them into coherent poems. That approach didn't really work. In the end, I found the first poems I wrote to be the best of the bunch.

Tricube for the Year of the Horse

New year dawns
doors open
luck enters

kin gather
to honor
ancestors

lanterns rise
wishes fly
like horses

Tricube for the Lunar New Year

two moons past

the winter

solstice eve

the new year 

welcomes spring

and the horse

hooves thunder

hearts gallop

luck runs wild

Block Printing Tricube

printmaker

sees art in

black and white 

lines and curves

gouged and cut

inked and rolled

paper smoothed

breathe and lift

image blooms

Poems ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2026. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems my Poetry Sisters have written at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? We're writing poems in response to a poem (any poem, you choose!) written by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze. You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on February 27th 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 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm. Happy poetry Friday! 

Poetry Friday is Here!

No matter which holiday you are celebrating this season, I wish you peace and light.

I am happy to host this last Poetry Friday of the year on a day when my poetry sisters and I have written to another challenge. This month, we were not locked into form, but theme, writing on the theme of peace, light, or hope.

I've been thinking of my mom lately, and all moms who deal with the chaos of the season. I wanted to write about finding peace in the midst of that chaos. I settled on the form of a sonnet. I had trouble choosing my favorite couplet to end it, so I'm sharing both.

Untitled Sonnet

When Christmas comes with drums and clanging cheer
the house becomes a stage for wild delight
the bells, the lists, the shouts of “Mom, come here!”
begin at dawn and echo through the night

The children shout, the playlist never ends
the oven groans beneath a sugared load
each hour invents three tasks it swiftly sends
to me alone, patrol of hearth and road

I crave sweet peace—a chair, a steaming cup
a door that stays untouched for sixty beats
I’d trade one present just to drink it up
in silence all alone and off my feet 

Yet when night falls and all the clamor ends
I laugh—this noise is love, my loudest friend

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2025. All rights reserved.

Here is the second couplet I wrote to end the sonnet. Which do you like better? 

Yet when night falls and all the sounds depart
I miss the noise that fills my tired heart

You can read the poems my Poetry Sisters have written at the links below.

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

We will be writing to 12 new challenges next year. We meet in early January to make our poetry plan. As soon as we have a January challenge, we'll share it with you so you can join in the fun.

I will be hitting the road before the sun comes up tomorrow to drive to western NY to visit family. That means I won't be around to visit your blogs and read your poems until late in the day or over the weekend. Rest assured that I will stop by!

Please join the Poetry Friday party by leaving your link below, and don't forget to leave a comment to let us know you're here. Happy poetry Friday, friends!  

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Click here to enter

Poetry Sisters Tackle the Burning Haibun

This month, the poetry sisters faced the challenge of the burning haibun. A burning haibun is composed of at least three parts—a prose poem, an erasure of that prose poem, and a haiku derived from an erasure of the previous erasure. PHEW! What I found most difficult about this form is the requirement that each erasure represents something different from the section that came before. 

You can read more about the form at Writing from the Ashes: On the Burning Haibun and Writing Prompt: Burning Haibun.

I have written haiku and blackout poems, but I have never written a prose poem. That's where this needed to start. I also tried to keep our theme of "in conversation" in mind, but I'm not sure the use of the word voices manages to get me there. Either way, this was a tough challenge, so I am happy to have a draft to share. The image shows the erasure that created the second poem. Below the image you can read the poem without the blackout. I like both forms, but for different reasons. There's something startling about seeing the earasure as part of this burning down of poetry.

On Resilience: A Burning Haibun

The ninth month burns at both ends. Morning arrives too soon, light spilling like fever across the asphalt. I run because not running feels heavier. The ground hums beneath me, a living pulse of heat and dust. I think of orbit, of repetition—how the earth returns to the same place and calls it new.
The body remembers what the mind resists. Each mile a small defiance, each footfall a kind of prayer. Autumn waits behind the curtain, still painting her leaves. The air burns, clings to summer’s breath, unwilling to let go.
Voices crescendo and pass me—strangers, certain, unbroken. I am neither fast nor sure. I am only moving, carrying the weight of my own doubt. The finish line is not a place but a threshold—thin, invisible, already inside me.
The sun watches everything. I keep running toward the part of myself that does not quit.

Morning arrives
the pulse of repetition
the earth remembers
resists defiance
each prayer clings to me
certain, unbroken
carrying the doubt 
inside me

The sun watches everything
that does not quit

morning remembers

each prayer, certain, unbroken

the sun does not quit

Burning Haibun ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2025. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems my Poetry Sisters have written at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? We're writing poems inspired by something overheard. You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on November 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 Jone Rush MacCulloch. Happy poetry Friday all! And Happy Halloween!

Poetry Sisters Write Tritina

This month's challenge was to write in the form of the tritina. The tritina is composed of 3 tercets and a final line (envoi) that stands alone. Similar to a sestina, though shorter, it uses a set of 3 alternating end words instead of six. The form is: 123 / 312 / 231 / 1, 2, 3 (final line/envoi).

Our theme for the year is "in conversation." The last time we wrote to this form (May 2016 if you want to check them out), we generated a list of words and selected our end words from the communal list. We didn't do that this time around, and I found not having words to work with made the challenge a lot harder.

Given our charged political times, I wanted to write about political conversations, but that didn't go well. I wrote a lot of really terrible poems before finally settling on the subject of secrets and whispering. After some thought and numerous revisions, I have two drafts. I wrote at least 10 different envois for version 1, and didn't like any of them. I tried some new end words and found that I like version 2 much better.

Image from: https://theosophical.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/telephone-game.jpg

The Telephone Game - Version 1
The message starts with just a whisper
children gather close to listen
as words twist and spark a laugh

The meaning bends and others laugh
as words are passed along in a whisper
each eager ear strains to listen

The end of the line waits to listen
excitement growing with every laugh—
but the truth slips by, lost in a whisper

Children at play whisper, listen, laugh—making indelible memories

The Telephone Game - Version 2
A secret phrase shared in a whisper
from lips to ear, heads bend
together in the telephone game

Truth unravels in the game
laughs punctuate every whisper
meaning shifts as words bend

Children in the circle wait to bend
their neighbor's ear in a game
carried forward whisper by whisper

In every whisper, truth bends to shape the game

Poems ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2025. All rights reserved.

You can read the poems my Poetry Sisters have written at the links below. A few folks are traveling this month, but they may pop up later with a poem.

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? We're writing burning haibun. You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on October 31st 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 Amy VanDerwater at The Poem Farm. Happy poetry Friday all!

Poetry Friday - Summer Poems Zine

Hello friends. I participated in Tabatha Yeatts summer poetry swap again this year. I received so many lovely poems and gifts from this community. I plan to highlight them in a post later this month. 

Today I want to share the poems I wrote for others and the zine I created to collect them all in one place. Here's what it looks like (unfolded).

You can download the file if you would like to fold your own copy. 

Do you need directions on how to fold a zine? 

Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord at makingbooks.com offers numerous free resources for creating various book forms. She calls this zine format a hotdog booklet. I love her easy-to-follow directions and images. You will find written directions and a downloadable PDF for this form on her site.

For the swap this year, I made and sent "poetry wallets," which were paper wallets made from recycled (upcycled?) envelopes with poetic form cards inside. Here's a peek at what they looked like.

The poems I wrote this year reflected some of the forms on the cards (there were 12 form cards in the wallet) and were all on summer topics. I usually do a better job of personalizing poems, so I fell short of the mark this time around. I wrote a sixth poem, not in one of these funky forms, but something more traditional (a sonnet), and sent it off to my pal Tanita, who was settling in to a new place this summer. That is the poem I'm sharing today.

Goodbye to Summer

In summer's garden fading in its glow  

old blossoms with their vibrant colors dim

yet fruits now swell with autumn's promise, slow  

as daylight wanes and shadows softly skim  

The apples blush with hints of rosy red 

as pears hang golden from big branching arms 

the vines with grapes like jewels finely spread

invite a taste of fall's forthcoming charms 

Faint is the buzz where once the bees did weave  

among the blooms now yielding to the field

tired flora gently take their leave

as nature turns, her secrets slow revealed

Thus ends sweet summer with its parting song  

to herald autumn's time, both crisp and strong

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2025. All rights reserved.

Image by wirestock on Freepik

I hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Jama Rattigan at Jama's Alphabet Soup. Happy poetry Friday all!