Unquenchable land of blushed sandstone, fragrant with cliffrose,
Tossed with tumbleweed, desert globemallow and gnarled junipers,
Awash with arches, hoodoos and bridges — remnants of ancient seas. Ages ago,
Hapless dwellers sighed farewell songs to these sacred grounds.

desert globemallow in Utah

fragrant Cliffrose and Balanced Rock

Cliffrose

Delicate Arch at Arches National Park

Skyline Arch at Arches National Park

Park Avenue at Arches National Park

Landscape Arch

Partition Arch

sunset at Arches National Park

Dead Horse Point State Park

Utah juniper

Canyonlands – Grand View Overlook

Sipapu Bridge Overlook – Natural Bridges National Monument

Owachomo Bridge at Natural Bridges National Monument
Valley of the Gods, on the way to Monument Valley, which is officially in Arizona:

Valley of the Gods

Valley of the Gods

Approach to Monument Valley
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“POETRY” Invitation: I invite you to write a poem of any poetic form on your own blog about a particular travel destination. Or you can write about travel in general. Concentrate on any intention you set for your poetry. In this case, I wrote an acrostic poem about Utah.
“The basic acrostic is a poem in which the first letters of the lines, read downwards, form a word, phrase, or sentence. Some acrostics have the vertical word at the end of the line, or in the middle. The double acrostic has two such vertical arrangements (either first and middle letters or first and last letters), while a triple acrostic has all three (first letters, middle, and last)” (from The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms).
Some examples of acrostics can be found in Seasonal Sonnets (Acrostic) by Mark A. Doherty.
You can either set your own poetic intentions, or use one of the prompts I’ve listed on this page: writing prompts: poetry. (This page is a work in process). You can also include photos, of course.
Include the link in the comments below by Thursday, July 5 at 1:00 p.m. EST. When I write my post in response to this challenge on Friday, July 6, I’ll include your links in that post.
This will be an ongoing invitation, on the first Friday of each month. Feel free to jump in at any time. 🙂
I hope you’ll join in our community. I look forward to reading your posts!
Revelling in the glory with you, Cathy! 🙂 🙂 I don’t know that I’ve ever seen those rock roses in photos. Don’t they look fabulous? Obviously the ideal time to visit. (and thanks for the poetic explanation 🙂 )
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The cliffrose was everywhere, Jo, and it was so fragrant. It made for such a pleasant accompaniment to all of our hikes! 🙂
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It looks fabulous! 🙂 🙂 Half packed and have just collapsed in a heap. Traveling much lighter than you could ever imagine.
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I’m sure your packing is always much lighter than I can imagine! At least you’re half done. You can relax now until you’re off. 🙂
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Time for a glass of red. Cheers, m’dear! 🙂
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Cheers to you, Jo! 🙂
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What amazing scenery, quite overwhelming with all the formations, great photos Cathy and I loved the poem. That is a format I have never heard of. I must admit though I have not read a lot of poetry since I left school ( a million years ago!!!) I’m tempted to have a go….
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Utah is magnificent, Pauline, and we didn’t even visit the more western parks like Zion, Bryce Canyon or Grand Canyon! That’s for another trip. I’m glad you liked the poem; it was a little difficult to capture the essence of UTAH in four lines, but at least I’ll have more letters for the other three states I visited. I’m not into rhyming poetry at all, so you won’t see much of that in my poetry invitations. I hope you’ll have a try at writing one. It’s fun to start with a structure and then work within that structure when writing. 🙂
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You inspire me Cathy I’ve been to the Grand Canyon it is breathtaking and a challenge, we walked the Angel trail, much younger back then…
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I only went to the Grand Canyon on a drive-through when my first husband and I were traveling around the country for 2 1/2 months in 1979. We stood at the rim and looked out over it, and, since we’d had our camera stolen in San Diego, we couldn’t even take a picture. Another whole trip I want to take is the western part of Utah and Arizona, where I go to Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Glen Canyon, Vermilion Cliffs, and more! I don’t know what year I’ll get to that, but I hope within the next several years! We did a lot of hiking on this trip, especially in Arches National Park, but in others as well. Once Mike parted ways to return home, my hiking dropped off somewhat. 🙂
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So you’ll still be keeping your fitness levels up. My daughter comes over from NZ tomorrow for a week so no blogging for a while. She’s in training for a trek up the Himalayas later this year.
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That’s great that your daughter’s going to trek in the Himalayas. And great she’s coming to visit! Have a fun visit, Pauline. 🙂
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Thanks Cathy she arrives this afternoon so I will be putting the iPad away for a while
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An interesting poem. I have seen that before but never knew it had a name!
As for the photos – stunning. Those rocks and arches are just mind-blowing. I wouldn’t want to get lost in any of these places though.
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There are so many poetic forms, Jude, so I’m going to try my hand at various forms. I set an intention to write an acrostic for each of the four states; notice I started with the shortest one! I have a feeling New Mexico will be the hardest, with that “X”! We really loved our time in these parks. Each of those pictures was hard-earned. In the case of Delicate Arch, the hike to that was NOT easy!! The same with Partition and Landscape Arch, and that Park Avenue hike wasn’t easy either. We always carried water with us and we stayed on the trails. Some were well-traveled and others weren’t. I definitely wouldn’t want to get lost there! 🙂
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You say ‘we’. Was this with Mike then? Or did you join hiking groups on your trip?
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Mike was with me during all of Utah and the northern part of Colorado. He flew back home from Phoenix, Arizona. We parted ways in Flagstaff and I was on my own through parts of Arizona and all of New Mexico and southern Colorado!
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Ah, nice that he could join you for this part of the trip.
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Yes, it was great to have him along. We did a lot more hiking when he was with me. I had some long stretches out in the middle of nowhere, and I would have liked to have him with me on those stretches! But we had a great trip altogether. 🙂
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Places to take him back to when he retires.
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So beautiful, we have been to most of those places and have happy memories of them.
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I’m sure you do, Anabel. I loved them all! 🙂
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Beautiful scenery in these photos, Cathy.
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Thanks, Carol. It was an amazing trip altogether! And this was just Utah.
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Here’s my newest “Loo with a View” post, the Kevtoberfest Edition. My claim to fame will be as the author of rhyming verse about bathrooms! https://theeternaltraveller.wordpress.com/2018/06/17/a-loo-with-a-view-the-kevtoberfest-edition/
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It was a fabulous trip, right? Your photos are really nice, Cathy. I love seeing a combination of flower closeups and the wide landscape views. The arch photos are all excellent – I see snow-capped mountains in the distance in one, wonderful old wood in the foreground in another, lots of great diagonals, and carefully thought-out compositions. I love the open road image! You know that, right? 😉 Maybe the photos are poems….
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The trip was magnificent, Lynn. I am just touching the tip of it here in this post. I visited 18 National Parks and Monuments, and plenty of interesting towns and kitschy Route 66 stuff to keep me busy for a long while. The photos may be a kind of poem in and of themselves. We hiked a LOT, so I found myself taking many angles of the same things! That’s often what happens when you’re on foot, right?
It was so funny when we approached Monument Valley and Mike said, What are all those fool people doing in the middle of the road? I yelled, STOP! This is the iconic spot where everyone takes the picture! Of course, I had to get out and stand in the middle of the road too. It wasn’t the safest thing to do! 🙂
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I love these desert landscapes and you give a depth to the acrostic form, which has always seemed oversimplified to me when I’ve encountered it in the past.
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Thanks, I’m so glad you enjoyed the desert landscapes. I did too, and I really miss them now that I’m home. It’s so difficult to write poetry of any kind, Meg, but I do find it fun to try my hand at different forms. I don’t often enjoy rhyming poetry, or even silly poetry, which I’ve often encountered in the acrostic form. I’m sure this one could go through infinite revisions, but since I’ve set deadlines for myself, I don’t have infinite time for them. I rarely leave anything I’ve written untouched though, so I’m sure I’ll revisit it. 🙂
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How’s the short story coming along?
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The short story set in Pittsburgh is finished, for what it’s worth. It’ll post tonight, although I can’t say if it’s any good. It was a fun exercise though.
Now I have the plan for the novel for my trip out west. I started today. Maybe that’s why I’m feeling so down! Sometimes I just don’t feel that I’m very creative at all. I keep trying though. 🙂
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I’d never tackle a novel. Even a short fiction is a major challenge. I wrote one heavily based on my research into WW1 instigated when I found my great uncle’s war diaries
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I wrote a novel before but it has never been published. It took me 1 1/2 years. I wrote it in 2002 and then have revised it four times over the years. I’ve had several people read it who gave me feedback and said they liked it, but they’re friends so I’m not sure I can wholly trust them to be brutally honest! Anyway, it’s still just sitting on my computer.
Your short story sounds fascinating. You should put it up sometime! I have to admit it’s a little nerve-wracking to put up something when you’re not sure about how well it works. But then I read Otto’s post Don’t Give a Damn! https://munchow.wordpress.com/2018/06/11/dont-give-a-damn/ I thought, what the heck. I can’t keep everything I write hidden forever. 🙂
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Is there a difference between posting and so called creative writing? I must admit I’m a bit nerve-wracked by posting occasionally, often when I’ve worked really hard on it.
I can’t imagine writing a novel. Good on you!
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In my eyes, Meg, a post is simply any piece you make live on your blog. That can include photography, poetry, travel essay, creative writing. I know the feeling about being nerve-wracked. If it’s just any old thing I haven’t spent much time on, like my recent post of wildlife in the Four Corners, I don’t bat an eye. But when I’ve worked hard on something, like a travel essay or my short story, I get very stressed about posting!
I could never imagine attempting a novel until a novelist friend of mine told me how she did hers at just three pages a day. She made that goal for herself and just kept moving forward, no revision along the way, just getting the first draft done. Then the hard part was revision, after the whole thing was written. I followed her advice and that’s how I got it done. As it’s been about 15 years since I finished my first one, I’ve had the urge to try again; now I’m going to buckle down and try again. Maybe my first novel is doomed for the trash heap, as many are. 🙂
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Even three pages a day sounds like a lot! J wrote a novel once, just to see if he could, and ended up consigning it to the flames of the fuel stove. I’ll be very interested in progress reports.
I understand the “any old thing”. I never angst about photo-posts, but the written word is a different matter, especially if I’ve crafted it, and maybe been a bit experimental. Really honest feedback is hard to come by – and even harder to give. One friend sought my critique of her novels for adolescents, and she asked me very specific questions, about character, narrative flow, the ending, which made it a lot easier to comment
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Three pages a day is tough sometimes, especially when writing fiction. I can’t tell you how many days I sat in front of the computer while writing my novel, with no imagination whatsoever, not having a clue what to write!
Who knows if mine will ever be published? I would never throw anything away because too much blood, sweat and tears have gone into them, even if they ultimately didn’t work.
When you spend a lot of time, energy and angst crafting a piece of writing, it is very stressful to post. Especially when you post it and people make some vague comment that show either they didn’t read it at all, or they read it and have nothing good to say! Yes, good feedback is hard to get and hard to give. I think you do have to be very specific. However, I’ve been in writing groups before where all people do is tear apart your writing with not much positive to say. If I were ever to lead a workshop, I would insist that each reader say something positive about the work and something that could be improved. 🙂
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Couldn’t agree more. Sometimes I think I’ll just make my posts private – keep writing, and forget about audience. But then I wouldn’t be conversing with you, or a number of other delightful people.
I can imagine three pages being tough when you need development and continuity. Once when I was working away a lot I committed to writing something for half an hour every night. It had no continuity but it was great fun. I never knew what would follow when I started writing. That tells you something about my level of seriousness!
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Yes, I know what you mean, Meg. I think writing in private is good, especially for a first draft. But you’re also right in that sharing with others is good for us, even if it’s only in virtual reality. After all, look at the friends you’ve made in reality, like Jo and Gilly and others.
Continuity is hard when writing anything of length in small snippets, but that’s why I don’t revise until the whole thing is done and then I know what, if anything, I’ve got. The story opens up in ways you don’t imagine at the beginning so you often have to go back and revise the beginning to match with what revealed itself later. It is fun to be working on a big project. I started writing a memoir, and I need to get back to it, but I was finding it so boring writing about myself. Blah blah blah!! That’s why I enjoy fiction because I can make things more interesting than my dull life. 🙂
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Your dull life????????!!!!!!????
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Haha, it sure seems dull when I write about it. 🙂
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beauty…lovely post Cathy…thank you for sharing 🤓💫 smiles hedy
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Thanks so much, Hedy. I’m glad you liked it. Thanks for visiting. 🙂
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☺️👍💫
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