May Third Sunday Write vs. The Pantoum

We’ve run across pantoums before, surely. A novelty poem form really, though sometimes good, truly poetic pantoums appear (maybe not here, of course): four-line stanzas with lines 2 and 4 repeated (or nearly so) as lines 1 and 3 in the following stanza. And on and on, with a final stanza sometimes — in a bizarro coming ’round the circle — repeating stanza one’s lines 1 and 3 as its 2nd and 4th.

But first things first, this being my usually late response to the Bloomington Writers Guild’s “Third Sunday Write” challenge for May (cf. May 8, below — yes, April’s posting was really late — et al.), in which prompt number 3, of 4, was: “Try a pantoum (if you dare),” followed with a link to a site describing the form.

So, sure, the below sucks. But a dare’s a dare, isn’t it? And, still reeling from NaPoWriMo, a little bit anyway, and with it my tendency to gather added inspiration by taking a prompt’s wording perhaps more literally (seriously? foolishly?) than ever the prompter had probably intended — and then throwing in resident Goth cat Triana, who appeared several times in April’s poem-a-day madness as well, since poems may have objects (while how about the poem itself addressed as a subject . . . ?) — here it is:

PANTOUM, PANTOUM

Pantoum, Pantoum,
what do you say,
tell me to whom
I should write you today.

What do you say,
a poem to my cat?
I should write it today —
you’re sure she’d like that!

A poem to my cat,
Triana’s her name,
you’re sure she’d like that,
and you’re hardly to blame

(Triana’s her name)
for the fact she can’t read!
Well, you’re sort of to blame
for the fact I’ll still need,

since Triana can’t read,
Pantoum, Pantoum,
the hint I’ll still need:
I should write you . . . to whom?