The goal of this excercise is exploring the conventions of the Fable genre mode. No chores, no deadlines, no absolute fixed standards or themes, no rules beyond the requirements and rules of courteous decorum and those of the Hatrack River workshop forum, particularly the limitation of the thirteen lines restriction. Open for creative participation, Fabulous Fables will run according to its natural course.

Rubric for composition, response, and discussion; conventions of the Fable mode: short story, once-upon-a-time-type opening; uncommonly people as characters, personifications of people through speaking and thinking objects and animals; imaginative premises involve metaphorical comparison to human mythos, supernatural experiences, and/or the human condition, commonly mellifluent prose, purple prose, can be in science fiction or fanatasy premises, settings, or characters. Other conventions of Fable not necessarily in the opening, a pithy maxim and a moral of the story related to the maxim.

Global rubric; imaginative premise, first cause, emotional premise, and inciting moment right up front along with all the other challenges of short story openings.

Recommendation: see Wikipedia topic Fable for additional insight.

Prompt; a tree in a woods, a hamadryad resides within the tree, the woods encroach upon the tree.

Where a Creek Ran By

 In the everlasting manners of the birds and bees, a waxwing flew over a broom sedge meadow. A creek ran by where the bird shat out a gob of seeds. The gob splattered on a sedge stalk and scattered seeds about the stream. One seed fell onto bald ground. In the flickering procession of nature's seasons, the seed grew into a cedar sapling. Vital, taller than the sedge, in time, the sapling's spreading branches overtopped the sedge and sedge no longer grew beneath the young tree.
 Other trees grew up around the cedar as it reached to the sky. A thought occurred to the cedar, I am in good company. "Thank you for joining me here beside the creek," the cedar said. Not having any regard of the cedar, being of opposite kinds, oaks and poplars and pines, the other trees did not reply.

untitled (so far)

In a deep wood there lay in the ground,
a hulled potential for life unbound.
Twas a seed true to form
but of metal made, far from norm.
Fed from the minerals of the earth
sun and rain did not give her birth.
Emerged from the soil strong and true
cold and smooth, upward she grew.
Tall and stout no branches had she
sturdy in the wind and foliage-free.
Shy she was, for different she felt,
out of place in the beauty of where she dwelt.

anyway, it may be a feeble attempt (a feeble fable?), but at least im throwing it out there and getting wet.

The word metal says right up front that the poem is in a science fiction mode, with a bit of the fantastical tacked on from the growing life and growing sentience of a gadgety plant possessing or posing as a hamadryad (but there's no mandate for anyone to adhere to that prompt). The Conflict and a hint of the First Cause is introduced by the plant being different and reinforced by the concluding couplet, which also introduces a sympathetic reasonance with a reader for the protagonist due to her shyness in an alien place. The opening lines have a sense of the once upon a time fairytale opening, but in the once-upon-a-place type that's the not-now variety. Yep, all the opening conventions of fable are there.

On poetry, absolutely no prohibition against a poetry fable. One thing that presented to me was the similarity to the sonnet form. A sonnet is a "little song" of fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme depending on whether it's an Italian sonnet or an English sonnet. Most Italian sonnets related to love in its myriad forms. Many English sonnets did too, but Shakespeare's were often conceits, often satirizing the Italian form and themes.

English sonnets traditionally have an iambic pentameter foot and meter. Foot is the stress of a number of syllables. Iambic foot is an unstressed followed by a stressed, two syllables per foot. Pentameter is five feet or ten syllables of meter. Free verse notwithstanding, the value of conforming to a traditional poetry form is that it tells how to read the poem's stresses, pauses, and rhythms. A hanging foot is made by an odd number of syllables or the number of syllables varying from line to line. A hanging foot should be read as a pause intended for dramatic effect.

Here's my analysis of the poem's structure;

1. 9 syllables, rhyme scheme A
2. 9 syllables, A
3. 6 syllables, B
4. 8 syllables, B
5. 9 syllables, C
6. 8 syllables, C
7. 8 syllables, D
8. 7 syllables, D
9. 7 syllables, E
10. 9 syllables, E
11. 9 syllables, F
12. 11 syllables, F

Overall, admirable writing and far above task for this exercise.

i really enjoyed this exercise, it opened a door that i must have missed along the way. im surprised that it met some of the conventions of the fable because im not sure i understood them well. i do a little better now.

thank you for analyzing the structure, this was something that i had thought to do after looking around at some other poetry. i realized that i had a lack of any real form, probably due to the fact that i know next to nothing about poetry, verse, whatever its called. i plan to do some further poking around the poetry frontier and try to build a bit of a foundation.

i finished the fable that night. it went a completely different direction than my outline, for worse or better. but it turned out to be so preachy and moralisitc that i can hardly stand to share it. maybe a result of trying to go for the pithy maxim. i may rework it to tone it down.

by the way, i thought "Where a Creek Ran By" was beautiful. poetic in its imagery. i found it quite daunting to attempt a story to participate in this exercise after reading it (but thats me, always sabotaging myself). i would love the opportunity to read the rest of your fable.

thanks for this exercise, it was an awakening experience for me.