Summer foods
Summer eats
Fresh wholesome
Tasty treats

Green beans – yum!
Dangling down
Pick and eat
Best all ’round

Cucumber
Love to munch
Garden yield
Fresh raw [crunch]

Yellow squash
Sliced, sauteed
Seasoned well
Makes the grade

Corn on cob
Freshly picked
Butter, salt
So perfect

Summer foods
Summer eats
Fresh wholesome
Tasty treats

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This poem is a Cethramtu Rannaigechta Moire.  I can’t pronounce it, but I can tell you that it’s an Irish poetic form that requires 3 syllable lines in quatrains. The second and fourth lines rhyme.

The W3 prompt this week is to write a food-related poem in any form. Okay, I thought, I’ll just write down everything I eat for the day and make a poem about it. Here was my first verse:

Farmstand egg
Whole wheat toast
Smoked Gouda
It’s the most

But I realized that almost everything else I ate was garden-related, so I nixed my egg sandwich and just put verses in that involved fresh produce.

When I rise up from sitting down to standing
My hip protests, “No! No! You can’t do that!”
But I’m active — and I’m sick of where I’ve sat
I actually love the physically demanding!
My hip protests, “No! No! You can’t do that”
When I rise up from sitting down to standing

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This was a tough challenge for me! The W3 challenge this week is to write a biolet. A biolet is a six line poem in which the first two lines are repeated as the last two lines, however in reverse. The rhyme scheme can be expressed as ABbaBA (with the capital letters representing the repeated lines).

Additionally, Sadje challenged us to use the theme of love/hate. I love being physically active. I hate the way this stupid hip pain is keeping me from being as active as I usually am.

i have never traveled

So much depends
Upon
The fog
a ribbon of moonlight
the dew on the morning grass
the snow carefully everywhere descending

somewhere, gladly beyond
a smaller gift — not the worn truth
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
the world offers itself to your imagination

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Line 1 and Line 8 — e.e. cummings — together these two lines make one complete line “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”

Lines 2 and 3 from a William Carlos Williams’ poem that nobody understands but is forced on high school students across the USA.

Line 4 Carl Sandburg — first line of the first poem I remember intentionally memorizing

Line 5 Alfred Noyes — not a full line, but from The Highwayman, the first poem I voluntarily memorized just because I liked it and was smitten by the tragedy of the story. Anne of Green Gables also memorized it, but I didn’t even know AoGG existed at the time.

Line 6 Billy Collins — not a full line, but from Litany — just a poem I love

Line 7 e.e. cummings again

Line 9 also Billy Collins — not a full line, but from The Lanyard — a poem one of my sons sent me for Mother’s Day one year.

Line 10 e.e. cummings — I LOVE e.e. cummings

Line 11 Mary Oliver — not a full line from Wild Geese — a poem one of my sons read at my father’s funeral

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A weak attempt at the W3 prompt this week: Write a Cento on the them of Love.

A cento is a poem formed of lines from poems written by others. I didn’t use whole lines most of the time.

At the first blink of a firefly in the backyard, we run outside. One blip is followed by two, then six. Soon the whole yard is a-twinkle with stringless winged fairy lights that we try to catch because surely a jarful would light up a whole room.

Such a plain beetle
Wings folded, frankly boring
Then magic begins

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This is my response to the W³ prompt this week which is to write a haibun, use onomatopoeia three times, use the theme of “The Beauty of Night.”

A haibun is a new form for me. It combines prose and haiku. I’m not 100% sure I did it right.

Onomatopoeia — blink, blip, twinkle — I hope they count.

The Beauty of Night — bioluminescence is amazing and beautiful, right?

If I
Can just be still
It’s possible I’ll have
The needed peace/quiet for a
Sweet dream

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This is my response to the W3 prompt for this week — to write a Golden Shovel poem. A Golden Shovel requires that the end word of each line form another author’s poem or quote. In my case, this is a very well-known quote from Martin Luther King, Jr, from a speech he gave in August 1963 — his “I Have a Dream” speech.

He repeats those words seven times — I have a dream; I have a dream; I have a dream; I have a dream; I have a dream; I have a dream; I have a dream.

But he begins that segment of the speech with these words, “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” I like the word “still” in there.

This is a Cinquain. Each line has a set syllable count: 2-4-6-8-2

The poem really has nothing to do with the quote.

who
can
resist
a spiral
laid in the pavement!
To walk heel-toe heel-toe around
the pattern carefully laid in brick in the courtyard

in
my
mind, it
was spiral —
faulty memory
that I have — when I looked it up
It was a mere labyrinth (as if that could be mere)

which
one
would prove
the harder
to build? A spiral?
Or a labyrinth? I would guess
The harder one to spell is the easier to build

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This is my response to this week’s W³ Challenge which is:

• FORM: Compose a ‘Fib’ poem(created by Gregory K. Pincus), which is a six-line poem of 1,1,2,3,5,8 syllables).
  • VARIATIONS:
    1. Write as few or as many lines as you wish, as long as your syllable count is based upon the Fibonacci Sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.).
    2. You may write more than one stanza, repeating the amount of lines of your first stanza.
• THEME: Write about a spiral; spiral shapes in nature or art, or perhaps a more figurative or metaphorical spiral.

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I was thinking about when I had been in Bayeux, France in 2017. One day, I had gone for a walk with my brother and sister. We found this labryinth:

It’s where my mind went when I read the prompt — but it’s clearly NOT a Fibonacci spiral.