So I’m back to hopping around poetry blogs, fitting my words into stanzas again.

I started with Laura Purdie Salas, who posted her Poetry Friday tritina and linked to the six other poets she blogs with and their own tritinas. My favorite  was this awesome poem about spiderlings ballooning away — what an entirely memorable image! Poet Tanita S. Davis captures joy and a sense of bursting up in the three stanzas, each featuring three of the six end words the group agreed to choose from: sweet, stone, hope, cold, mouth, thread. And Tanita S. Davis even wrote a second beautiful tritina with the remaining words, invoking spring. I also enjoyed the three tritinas offered by Liz Garton Scanlon. I loved the poem “Recipe,” and especially the final line — the envoi  that brings the poem to a hopeful close.

I’ve tried my hand writing a few sestinas, and this form is almost an abbreviated form of that. Several of the poet bloggers mentioned that this brevity makes the repetition a little more challenging, and I felt a bit intimidated after reading all of their poems before starting my own. Those six words rolled through my head in all directions, and what possible image could I call to mind that had not already been featured? Spiderlings in flight! Sweet words and hope!

My son has been home sick the last two days, and yesterday I took advantage of the Monday off to hand-wash some of my cotton dresses to get them ready to wear in the warmer weather. It was almost too windy to keep them from flying off the back deck, but they looked so happy flapping in the breeze, so I took this picture, and last night wrote a quick attempt at a tritina!

dresses, drying in the sun

the wind is gusting hard but smelling sweet

like spring. three cotton frocks, hand-washed in cold

flutter from the rail, and I hope

they stay content to billow, hopeful

pennants beckoning in sweet

invitation to the end of cold

weather, the end of dressing for cold

mornings, layered against the hidden hope

of warmer afternoons, bright colors, sunshine sweet

and in that sweetness a promise of the conquered cold, a summer hope.