Shadormas

The shadorma is a supposedly-Spanish 6-line syllabic form in which the syllable count is 3/5/3/3/7/5.

The origin's a bit of a mystery to me. Every source seems to be at least partly copy-pasted, or barely paraphrased, or just translated into a different language. The form itself is nothing like traditional European poetry and honestly feels a lot more like another 20th/21st-century Euro haiku type beat, maybe Spanish but also maybe just assigned Spanish to avoid the negative stereotypes of English-language haiku, or just to add mystery for English-speakers. That said, it seems workable, unlike some other fake forms (e.g. the paradelle).

Notes

Thoughts after writing one: Compared to the haiku, the shadorma has nothing except a rigid syllable pattern, and since this probably-a-hoax form has no explanation of or justification for its prosody I have no reason to think that pattern has any emergent properties that make it any more interesting than basically any combo of short lines with odd-numbered syllable counts.

Poems

1. 2025-05-08
   Landgrasp's Creed

   casket walls
   enclose the landgrasp
   and his creed
   for us worms:
   “Sovereign of all I survey—
   life's great provider.”