CINQUAINS

august night at p.g.h.

m.d.’s,

carers, interns,

zookeepers and vultures

in a labyrinth of melding

colors.

zombies,

whirling about;

my world, peripheral,

like zebra stripes off a huge wall:

lifeless.

framed sky

abysmal black

blank stares, Janus-faced fate,

in calloused hands with flawless gowns

amen.

thin line:

vanishing twitch…

green strip on black, soundless!

a pink-less rose, withered and stiff

aground.

*  * *

I first encountered cinquains during my college days, and writing these felt like a rediscovery or a revisit of this relatively quaint poetic format. For those who are unfamiliar with this style, a cinquain is a class of poetic forms that employs a five-line pattern, quite similar to the Japanese tanka.

The specific style I used here is the modern version invented by American poet Adelaide Crapsey. This format utilizes exactly 22 syllables distributed across five lines in a strict 2-4-6-8-2 pattern.

I have always used writing as a way to capture fleeting snippets of verse. The activity, albeit brief and spontaneous, serves as an excellent source of freedom and a tamed arena for releasing deep internal tensions. When inspiration strikes, I usually scribble just a line or two that relates personally to my experiences or emotions at that exact moment. My lines do not necessarily employ conventional poetic meter or rigid rhyme schemes; instead, they simply speak of things that I am extremely interested in or passionate about.

However, this was my very first attempt at writing structured cinquains.

The four stanzas above are the products of random thoughts originally typed into my cellphone and saved as SMS drafts during my wife’s two-week confinement before her death at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) in Manila, as well as the succeeding days I spent wandering the hospital corridors to settle important documents.

These fragments are stray thoughts captured on separate occasions. I simply let the words flow in the moment, and I went back to do a couple of structural drafts after the fog began to clear. It was during that process that I discovered some of my raw lines were already remarkably close to the traditional cinquain format. I only had to revise them slightly, selecting this specific set of four to piece together a single, cohesive narrative arc.

So, there they are. I invite you to look closely at how these seemingly unrelated words knit together to form a stark, clinical imagery. They are almost too brief for a longer commentary.