Read Write Believe: July 2023

Friday, July 28, 2023

Poetry Friday: The Monotetra

Of course we stopped
at the "world's smallest Bigfoot store"
because that's what you do
on vacation.

The July challenge is the monotetra. If you parse that name, you'll see it means something like "single-four" because each stanza has a repeated mono-rhyme scheme---yes, every single line rhymes with each other!-- and four "feet" per line. (A foot has two syllables, so this means eight syllables for each line.) You can write as many stanzas as you like, and (thankfully) vary the singular rhyme between stanzas, but each stanza is only four lines, and each ends with four repeated syllables.

Confused? Here's how Writer's Digest explains it.

So...do all those rules make writing a monotetra easier or harder? I say easier because it tells you what to do...and harder because it leans towards sounding forced. Add in our 2023 theme of transformation (conversion, alteration, metamorphosis, mutation, growth, evolution, revision, modulation, change.. ) and I had myself a job to do. At least I had Bigfoot and the new Star Trek series to put me in mind of how exploration spurs transformation....

The Lagoon Nebula,
image courtesy of the
Hubble Telescope

Strange New Worlds*

Dust hangs like ochre chandeliers
over the trails of pioneers;
the ragged edge of their frontiers
unstrung by years; unstrung by years.

A parchment map, the cloth unwound
in a graveyard of ships gone down
still threads the rocks without a sound;
calls the unfound, calls the unfound.

Now nebulas expand, efface
starlight, a crown of crocheted lace
knotting this fringe of outer space
with dark grace, with dark grace.

Again we'll blind-twist, one by one,
from rough hems of times overrun,
fresh seams; an old revolution:
the world undone; the world undone.

---Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)