This month Margaret Simon set our challenge. She invited us to write a shadorma, “a Spanish 6-line syllabic poem of 3/5/3/3/7/5 syllable lines respectively.” It’s a fun form to play around with, and I’m sure I’ll be revisiting it.
Illuminated Manuscript
Distant trees inscribe the full moon Their branches cast shadows as mysterious to me as hieroglyphics
March 2025 SOLC–Day 7 A huge thank you to Two Writing Teachers for all that they do to create an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write, learn, share and grow. http://www.twowritingteachers.org This post serves dual purpose today as it’s also a post for the Poetry Friday Roundup.You might want to check it out. It’s another fabulous writing community.
This month it was my turn to pose a challenge for my writing group, The Inklings. I suggested that we try writing hermit crab poems. These poems are poems that take another structure, like a recipe or a want ad, and create a poem within that structure. As one website put it, “Hermit crabs are known for creating inventive homes in all sorts of surprising spaces and containers. As writers, we can use the containers of other types of writing to form inventive poetry!” People do some really crazy creative things with hermit crab poems and I’d been wanting to try one for some time, so, I inflicted my wish on my writing group. I hope they had fun!
Of course, once you set a challenge, you also have to complete it. Time passed…things got busy…more time passed. Then I sat down this past weekend, determined to create my poem, or at least begin. I hadn’t written anything yet, but I’d already been thinking a lot about it. I knew I wanted to use a seed catalogue format. I also knew I wanted to write something politically pointed. Finally, I was wanting to play with Canva a bit more.
So, I looked up seed catalogues, got some ideas for the basic format, and started writing. I opted to focus on Democracy, something that appears to need some significant nurturing and grassroots support right now. First, I created a list of common categories (light, water, etc.), and then tried to figure out how to adapt them to my topic. I really enjoyed the mental exercise of trying to find the overlap between my topic and seeds within the form I’d chosen.
I wish I’d had more time to play around with a prose poem introduction, but maybe that’s something I come back to. As it is, it doesn’t feel totally poetic, but I had so much fun with the process, that I decided I didn’t really care. (Poetic license not to be poetic, maybe?) Also, sometimes you just have to cross your fingers and put what you have done out there, and trust it will land in fertile soil. So here’s my hermit crab “poem”:
Nix the comfort zone 