#AandIPoetryChallenge: October 2018 – Pantoum

New Zealand blogger and writer, Ineke, from I scrap 2 and blogger, Amanda, from Something to Ponder About in Australia are jointly hosting the A and I Poetry Challenge in English and Afrikaans, in the WordPress community.

I already responded to the October prompt but I’ve been playing around with the Pantoum for a while, and since this is the last month of this challenge, I decided to add this entry as well. I must thank you both, Amanda and Ineke, for hosting this challenge. I had so much fun, I really learned a lot and I am keeping my fingers crossed for a repeat performance.

A pantoum is a poem that makes use of repetition to drive home the emotions that the poet is trying to convey. It is a Malay verse form, also imitated in French and English, with a rhyme scheme ABAB.

The poem consists of a series of quatrains (4 line stanzas). The second and fourth lines of each quatrain are repeated as the first and third lines of the next. The second and fourth lines of the final stanza repeat the first and third lines of the first stanza. Source: Poetry Foundation.

We recently moved into a new security complex where quite a few elderly retirees are accommodated, but we also have a few families with young children. Furthermore, we have a good racial mix. The townhouses are not fenced in and residents move freely in the common grounds (gardens and parking spaces).

When we moved in, I noticed that we were attracting a fair amount of interest, for no reason other than that we were newcomers in the neighbourhood. People obviously wondered how their new neighbours were going to fit in with the community. The children, especially, made use of every chance they got to peek in at our windows and doors. It is their behaviour that sparked my train of thought for this poem.

We have now been living here for a while and we leave our doors and drapes open until bedtime (only closing the security doors to keep the monkeys out!), as is the custom here. Our very ordinary lifestyle and approachability ensure that we are no longer in the spotlight 😊

This is what I came up with: