Just the scarecrow with the broken head
Micropoetry is a different love language. I like the longer poems. I walk through metaphors and anaphora and line breaks the way some people experience flower meadows. I like the way verses ebb and flow till an unexpected close.
But brevity is a trap. The smaller poems still demand beauty and layers and nuance — a profoundly elegant minimalism. And while a haiku might be just an intense moment and the tanka its refined extension, forms that limit lines and words and syllables (while sometimes insisting on rhyme) can be a challenge. The shorter they are, the more difficult to get right. To me, though, the most interesting of the microforms is the Cherita. Created by Ai Li, Cherita is about story-telling but in six lines, split into three verses. There is pause, there is room for light and air and enough opportunity to create. That isn’t a bad way to write. Life, if you’re listening, that isn’t a bad way to be, either.
I wrote a few Cherita this week as the news headlines, strident and acerbic, overwhelmed me. To anyone thinking this really can’t be the world we signed up for, I feel what you feel. How to glue a broken universe together is another problem altogether, but there can be poetry on the side while we look for tools and tape and humanity. Poems to hold us together…poems to hold on to…as we find a way forward.
(1) How many people does it take to displace a people? How many mirrors to create a thousand mirrors? (2) The poet said every beautiful poem is an act of resistance. I lay roses on paper, as on a grave. (3) Something about the night and the wet breeze and the lanterns trembling behind tent walls and the stars looking down as if this is the promised heaven. (4) How will you explain to the child what a missile is what home is and even before it knows love, what hate is? (5) Nothing was left. Just the scarecrow with the broken head. But look, even then, not one bird. (6) War is that thing with pronouns. I was scrolling. Her child died. They walked along the beach. We voted. It passed us by.
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If you have posted Cherita too or would like to try one, do drop your poem or the link in the comments. Would love to read your work.
#Poetry
Thank you for sharing the Cheritas, Rajani. I had never stumbled upon the form and found myself wanting to explore the structure as soon as possible.
I loved every poem, each hitting me differently, as if creating ripples through the dimensions of my existence.
They are so loud here, they are hard to ignore. Or maybe it's just me. I always feel like they are nagging me to get outside myself and pay attention.