sherlock60 | Mrs. Hudson's Poetry Page: The Red Circle (Reply)

Welcome once again to my poetry page!

I hope each week you will read Dr. Watson’s delightful narrative and then go on to write a poem related to it in some way. All forms of poetry are permitted, and further down the page there is a selection you might like to consider using over the coming weeks.

And here, courtesy of my housemaid Rachel, is this week’s suggested poem to read—a suggestion inspired by the themes and subjects in this week's story. Hopefully you will enjoy the poem, and perhaps it may give you some ideas for a poem of your own or allow you to look at Dr. Watson's story in a new way.

The Raspberry Room

By Karin Gottshall

Note from Rachel: It must have been nightmarish for Mrs. Lucca to remain hidden in that room, never sure when violent disaster might overtake her husband or herself. I hope that she had a memory like the one described in this poem, of a refuge where - through blood and struggle - she could feel safe at last.

Thank you so much to Rachel. And I thought we could also have a go at a new poetry form: the hay(na)ku.

Robert Lee Brewer on Writer’s Digest gives this definition:

Hay(na)ku is a very simple poetic form, and it’s also one of the newest. It was apparently created in 2003 by poet Eileen Tabios.

Hay(na)ku is a 3-line poem with one word in the first line, two words in the second, and three in the third. There are no restrictions beyond this…

There are already some variations of this new poetic form. For instance, a reverse hay(na)ku has lines of three, two, and one word(s) for lines one, two, and three respectively. Also, multiple hay(na)ku can be chained together to form longer poems.

And in the comments, Vince Gotera explains: Eileen Tabios invented (no, birthed) the hay(na)ku. But I am its godfather; I named it. The name is a pun on "haiku" and the Filipino phrase "ay naku" which means something like "oh my gosh."

Here is my example:

Someone
Has swiped
My gin cocktail.

Someone
I think
Called ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

So
My retribution
Is being planned.

Oh,
I've means
For another cocktail.

Gin
Mint, lemon
A glass, but

Still.
It was
The last straw.

But you do not have to use that form. Any form of poetry is welcome this week—and every week! Here are a few suggestions for you:

221B verselet, abecedarian poetry, acrostic poetry, alexandrine, ballad, beeswing, blackout poetry, blitz poem, blues stanza, bref double, Burns stanza, call and response, chastushka, cinquain, circular poetry, clerihew, colour poems, compound word verse, concrete poetry, Cornish verse, curtal sonnet, diamante, doggerel, double dactyl, echo verse, ekphrasis, elegiac couplet, elegiac stanza, elfje, englyn, epigram, epistle, epitaph, epulaeryu, Etheree, fable, Fib, florette, found poetry, free verse, ghazal, haiku, hay(na)ku, In Memoriam stanza, Italian sonnet, jueju, kennings poem, lanturne, lies, limerick, line messaging, list poem, lyric poetry, mathnawī, micropoetry, mini-monoverse, musette, nonsense verse, palindrome poetry, pantoum, Parallelismus Membrorum, poem cycle, quintilla, renga, rhyming alliterisen, riddle, rime couée, Schüttelreim, sedoka, septet, sestina, sonnet, stream of consciousness, tanka, tercet, terza rima, tongue twister poetry, triangular triplet, triolet, Tyburn, villanelle

Please leave all your poems inspired by The Red Circle in the comments on this post. I look forward to seeing them!

Warm regards,

Mrs. Hudson