Riddle-ku

Last week I learned about an invented poetry form called riddle-ku.¹ Did you know you can invent your own poetry forms? I’m still learning all I can about existing forms and practicing new poetry skills. But maybe someday. In the meantime, riddle-ku was a fun surprise.

Children’s book author and poet Laura Purdie Salas created riddle-ku in 2014 to celebrate National Poetry Month. The form combines mask poetry, American haiku, and riddles. A mask poem is written from the point of view of an object as if the poet were that object. Salas put a collection of mask poems in American haiku form in her book, Lion of the Sky: Haiku for All Seasons. Readers use clues in the poem to solve the riddle of the object’s identity.

Here is my attempt at riddle-ku:

   I dive to drape rock

   Shoulders, cape wall with silken

   Fabric ever furled.

The thing about forms, though, is sometimes they restrict ideas. Forms are fun to play with but must serve ideas. So here is my second attempt, written in free verse:

   Moisture dives

   forming drape,

   forming cape,

   covering burrows hidden

   within silk furl

   of water.

 

¹Salas, Laura Purdie. Lion of the Sky: Haiku for All Seasons. Minneapolis: Millbrook Press, 2019.