Runner-up submission for the 2026 Frisco Public Library Poetry Contest (published in the 2026 Poetry Anthology)
Written March 2025
Prompt: Write a short poem that uses both iambic lines and trochaic lines.
In certain misty valley towns
there is a sense of home;
a feeling great and ancient
that lets no one alone.
A group of people gathers slowly
Moving round a flame;
Dragging fingers through the air,
streaking mist in vapor trains.
Down the slopes of mountainsides
the clouds of friendship roll;
seeking all the hearts of those
with happy, lively souls.
For certain misty valley towns
they share a sense of home;
a sense so strong and searching
it fills those mounts of stone.
Inspirations and Comments
This poem was supposed to be a generic description of the things you can do with different rhythmic patterns, like iambs and trochees. But, like many other things, poetry is rarely generic in any way. As soon as I started writing this poem, I realized there was a whole lot I could do with it beyond just the rhythmic schemes; I quickly thought of a mental image and used that image to inspire the remainder of the poem.
As I wrote Misty Valley Towns, I thought about a small mountainside village, possibly one that existed thousands of years ago. I considered what traditions or rituals they might have, and pondered the physical and emotional aesthetics of their settlement without worrying about what was historically or culturally accurate. I just came up with a simple mental picture, based purely upon intuition, and used that to inform the direction of the lines. I even managed to integrate some rhymes into the poem, but decided only to use the second and fourth lines of each stanza in the rhyme scheme to keep things free-flowing and organic.
Although I wrote this poem in early 2025, it wasn’t until the spring of 2026 that I submitted it into the local Frisco Public Library Poetry Contest. Unexpectedly (given a series of failures with this same contest over the past few years), the poem earned the Runner-up recognition and was subsequently published in that year’s poetry anthology. Misty Valley Towns marks the second poem of mine to be published in an anthology (see Leaves Whispering for the first one).