Tag Archives: Terza Rima

Terza Rima 1-e – Heat Wave

longing for rain is quite futile, you know
this heatwave continues, no end in sight
seconds to minutes the hours tic slow

~kat


Terza Rima #1-d – Heat Wave

dark hollows erupt in wild mushrooms
creatures, nocturnal, creep, burrowing low
stale air swirls in darkening rooms

~kat


Terza Rima #1-b – Heat Wave

no squirrels scampering; too hot to toil
in sweltering shaded hollows, creatures keep
nighttime’s a blessing, cool, but sleep is spoiled

~kat

Installment 2 of Heat Wave for this month’s Terza Rima Daily Poem Challenge, one tercet at a time.


Terza Rima #1-a – Heat Wave


no cool breezes today to temper the heat
waves rising from pavement, hot, smelling of oil
with hints of green, wilting, birds fluttering, tweet

~kat

This month we’re doing a Terza Rima stanza a day for our poem a day challenge. A Terza Rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. The two possible endings for the example above are d-e-d, e or d-e-d, e-e. Some descriptions suggest a syllable count of 11 per line in an iambic meter. I’m going to try that. Thanks to Jane Dougherty for her encouragement to write a short poem a day!