“An April routine starts anew, here; /
Five lines and their rhyme scheme will do, here. /
Eighth time at routine /
Of the verse-science mien: /
Thus, chem-themed ‘octet’ to ensue, here.”
This is the first week of autumn classes at my college, so I will start my iterative writing routine back up, revisiting previously written light verse. Correspondingly, this is the poem from the first day of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) from April 2026.
“An April routine starts anew, here; /
Five lines and their rhyme scheme will do, here.”
The most consistent routine I’ve maintained on this website stems from the NaPoWriMo tradition: posting 30 poems in 30 days during National Poetry Writing Month, which is April.
Each day throughout the past eight Aprils, starting in 2019, I have written a chemistry-themed poem and posted it on either Twitter or Bluesky. Typically, although not always, these have been limericks, where “[f]ive lines and their rhyme schemes will do.”
“Eighth time at routine /
Of the verse-science mien…”
1 April 2026 marked my eighth time beginning this tradition. Most of the poems I post have chemistry themes (they are “of the verse-science mien”), although sometimes I detour into simply celebrating spring or noting some more general aspects of academia.
“Thus, chem-themed ‘octet’ to ensue, here.”
In chemistry, the word “octet” is often a useful shorthand, denoting that a chemical species has eight valence electrons, wherein this characteristic indicates stability.
For instance, a noble gas is unlikely to react because it has a full s subshell (which holds two electrons total) and a full p subshell (which holds six electrons total). It already has a full octet and doesn’t want to disturb that. The “octet rule” is likewise a heuristic taught in introductory chemistry to predict how compounds will form: the atoms involved typically each achieve a full octet via bonding patterns.
I’ve thought before that, given the centrality of the number eight to chemistry’s patterns, it will likely be fitting for my eighth time through NaPoWriMo and its echoing essays to be the last routine I follow quite so rigorously, in this specific way.
Chemphasis 