So far, on The Write Spot Blog, the prompts have been nice and easy. How about challenging yourself with a pantoum?

Pantoum is the Western word for the Malayan pantun, a poetic form that first appeared in the fifteenth century, in Malayan literature. It existed orally before then.

The Western version of the pantoum is a poem of indefinite length made up of stanzas whose four lines are repeated in a pattern: lines 2 and 4 of each stanza are repeated as lines 1 and 3 of the next stanza.

___________________________________________________________  line 1

___________________________________________________________  line 2

___________________________________________________________  line 3

___________________________________________________________  line 4

___________________________________________________________  line 5 – same as line 2

___________________________________________________________   line 6

___________________________________________________________   line 7 – same as line 4

___________________________________________________________   line 8

___________________________________________________________   line 9 – same as line 6

___________________________________________________________   line 10 – same as line 3

___________________________________________________________   line 11 – same as line 8

___________________________________________________________   line 12 – same as line 1

The final stanza has a twist: The second and fourth lines are the same as the third and first lines of the first stanza. The first line of the poem is the same as the last. This way, every line is used twice.

Click on comments below to see samples of pantoums.