All Over the Place: Cherita

By Michael H. Brownstein

Ai Li is the editor of The Cherita website, and the founder of a type of poetry she calls Cherita, from the Malay word for story, or tale. A cherita poem has six lines arranged in three verses, with no title. It sort of tells a story. The main format of a cherita is 1‑2‑3: a 1‑line verse followed by a 2‑line verse, followed by a 3‑line verse. A cherita terbalik (inverted cherita) has one of the other five possible sequences of 1‑, 2‑, and 3‑line verses: 1‑3‑2,  2‑1‑3,  2‑3‑1,  3‑1‑2,  or 3‑2‑1.
    Ai Li read my poem “Moon Shower,” which was published on Mediterranean Poetry: An Odyssey through the Mediterranean World and thought it contained the makings of a nice cherita. Here’s my poem she read:

Moon Shower

A wet blue sky,
the air heavy with rain,
and in this place where breezes blows,
no breeze blows.

Listen:
the branches of the great trees talk to each other,
their leaves folding into one another,
and the moon slips behind a clash of consonants,
a sudden lurch of lightning
and after a day of beach and sunlight,
night comes with water
and wine.

Sit outside with me a moment.
You can finish your chores tomorrow.
Tonight is a time for the movements of air,
a dialogue of branches,
the conducting of clouds,
and if we get wet, no matter,
I am in your debt.

    Extracting from the seven lines of my poem’s last stanza, Ai Li made a few revisions and wrote: “I found a cherita terbalik.” It’s of the 3‑1‑2 variety. Here is the poem she published on her site:

Sit outside with me a moment.
You can finish your chores tomorrow
Tonight is a time for the movements of air,

a dialogue of branches,

the conducting of clouds,
and if we get wet, no matter.

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Here is a photograph showing Ai Li, taken from her UK website, Still: Home for Short Verse:

    A more detailed discussion of Cherita can be read on Ai Li’s UK website.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.