Something New
The cherita is a new poetry form, devised in 1997 by the poet ai li. ‘Cherita’ is the Malay word for story or tale. Concise and straight forward, depending on suggestion for its impact, it is perhaps the ideal poetry form for today.
More narrative than the three-line haiku, less lyrical than the five-line tanka, a six-line cherita furnishes the reader with an image that expands to a story in the mind.
ARC is a collection of my cherita. If read in sequence, the 66 cherita tell a life story, a love story. They can also be read at random. Most of these appeared first in the cherita.com, edited by ai li.
ARC is available in paper back and in Kindle formats from Amazon .
An example of the cherita:
I was happy
sleeping in his arms
waking to his voice
never noticing the clock
how quickly
the hands move