Wanted to let everyone know the Cinquain prompt from Mondays will be moving to Wednesdays starting next week with #3. I thought I would try Mondays again, like I did for 10 years with the Haiku challenge, but I don’t think it quite works.
For this weeks Cinquain Poetry Prompt of Magic.
© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
Abracadabra
Image
Disaster, revenge
Words of bluster and spin
Making failures to look like wins.
Mirrors!
For this weeks Cinquain Poetry Prompt of Magic.
© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
Gemini
Two sides,
One brain, two hearts
Confusion multiplied
Twice the amount of joy and pain.
Again?
© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
I’ve written a couple or more posts recently on how to write an American style cinquain developed by Adelaide Crapsey. But… sometimes I can get a bit wordy. So, let’s get unwordy.
If you like Haiku, which this blog has a history of, you’ll like the cinquain. It’s 5 lines with a syllable structure of 2/4/6/8/2. This isn’t by accident. Adelaide was a fan of haiku.
Here is an example of an American cinquain I wrote:
Remember
Away
To foreign lands
And dreams of saving hopes,
Reality of breaking hearts.
Look back.
I wrote about Memorial Day and the soldiers who went to war. Some had hopes and dreams of changing the world, saving lives, and bringing freedom where there was none. Many never came back, or have since passed away, bringing sadness to their loved ones. We remember those who we’ve lost on Memorial Day.
To write an American cinquain, I took the idea I just shared and made it as concise as I could, using the most descriptive words I could think of at the time. The first four lines are one feeling and are moving forward, with the final line flipping to look back and is related to the first line.
And that’s how an American cinquain often is. Here with ‘Remember’, you can see the relationship of ‘Away’ and ‘Look back’. It can be seen in two ways. One way is those who have left, gone away, can look back after they’ve left, or secondly, it can be the loved ones looking back on the memories.
Now that you know how to write one, join the prompt each week. Leave your link in the comments of that week’s prompt and people might visit your blog to check it out.
© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
Keep Moving
Hopeless.
The days, long, and taxing,
With unending smallness,
Fall over my old sanity,
Be strong!
For this weeks Cinquain Poetry Prompt of The Light.
© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
Remember
Away
To foreign lands
And dreams of saving hopes,
Reality of breaking hearts.
Look back.
© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
It’s time for a new poetry style and prompt that begins next week.
The Cinquain or more precisely the American Cinquain.
My Example:
Old Days
See how
The sun rises,
Breaking over beauty,
Filling the senses with heaven
Then fades.
You can see the pattern above is as follows…
5 Lines with each a given number of syllables as
2
4
6
8
2
An iambic foot with the stresses by line being
1
2
3
4
1
For the first line of the poem there will be two syllables with one stressed syllable and that one being the second one, which establishes the pattern.
The Cinquain most commonly used is the American Cinquain created by Adelaide Crapsey. Although she did not write down specific rules for composing one of her Cinquains, we have a form from people who have studied her poetry and have found commonalities in her works, those being the syllable and iambic foot, stresses pattern, although the iambic foot is not a requirement. The other characteristic is storytelling, compacting a feeling or scene into a few short lines and syllables.
Two Adelaide Crapsey Cinquain poems:
November Night
Listen . . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
Trapped
Well and
If day on day
Follows and weary year
On year . . . and ever days and years . . .
Well?
© 2025- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
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