Secret Friend
Rhyming PoetryThis was written for the 2026 Press 53 poetry competition.
Poems for that competition had to adhere to a given structure of four stanzas with three lines each, except the last one with two lines. Syllables per line had to be 7/5/3, with the last stanza 5/3, for an overall number of 53and each line having a prime number of syllables. I honestly would have preferred for the last stanza to be 3/2/3, which would also be all prime numbers, but oh, well.
I hadn't written anything using rhymes or a strict structure since my sonnet Fling of Petals in 2017 and had gotten far from both habits in the meantime, tending to free-form poetry without rhymes, and even incorporating prose sections to create what I referred to as „broken poems“, so this was an interesting challenge for me.
The structure of the poem felt like it was more suited to something cheerful with maybe a turn a the very end. Sadness, anger, even critique don't do well in rhyme schemes. And so I turned to an idea that had been lurking in my mind for some time, befriending a mouse as a child.
To address that one elephant over in the corner: No, this story is not autobiographical. I do catch mice alive instead of killing them, but I do catch and them for release in the wild. I do not feed wild mice, never did. This was inspired by finding a mouse under a cupboard, but that is the extent of real events in this poem.
The poem ended up not winning the competition, and with it being very specific to that, I decided to make it into a video instead of sending it elsewhere for another round.
September 2026
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