And now our (again — totally optional) prompt! Today, I challenge you to write a pantun. Not a pantoum— though they are related. The pantun is a traditional Malay form, a style of which was later adapted into French and then English as the pantoum. A pantun consists of rhymed quatrains (abab), with 8-12 syllables per line. The first two lines of each quatrain aren’t meant to have a formal, logical link to the second two lines, although the two halves of each quatrain are supposed to have an imaginative or imagistic connection.The associative leap from the first couplet to the second allows for a great deal of surprise and also helps give the poems are very mysterious and lyrical quality. Try your hand at just one quatrain, or a bunch of them, and see how you do!
she used to laugh out loud, out of control
at all those people who called her crazy.
now she just sings out her theatrical role
at all those people she gives a daisy.
she used to cry out loud, out of control
at all those people who said her goodbye.
now she’s her own positive magnetic pole
at all those people she smiles the sky.
a.aime
aaimepharmacy 