The Ballad of Maelewano

by Rambling Writer

Outro

And so we come upon the end
Of Maelewano’s tale.
Though she’d faced great adversity,
She finally had prevailed.

Zebrabwe, as we know it now,
Had not yet come to be
But the foundation had been laid,
Its safety guaranteed.

Though Maele never served as queen,
She earned her reputation;
Without her, zebras never would have
Come to be one nation.

An emissary she remained
Until her life was spent.
If some tribes needed mediation,
That was where she went.

For Maele knew of friendship’s strength,
The force that it could be,
And that is why, in Zebran now,
Her name means “harmony”.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Nicely done. Poetry always makes for tricky business, but you got this to work out quite well. (And I do have to appreciate the irony of Discord's meddling leading to greater harmony.) Best of luck in the judging.

[Ice Star]

Amazingly underrated. The fact that this is all poetry is awesome. It’s very rare on this site that someone is crazy enough to go for more than 1k of poetry.

[Rambling Writer]

10116025
Honestly, ballad meter is fairly easy to write, as long as you're willing to break the usual rules of sentence structure over your knee. It's surprisingly close to semi-normal speech and once you've been writing in it for a while, you start thinking in the proper meter. (That being said, I still had a rhyming dictionary open in one tab pretty much from start to finish.)

[Ice Star]

10116063
I use a rhyming dictionary after getting a set of starting words stuck in my head too, otherwise I would be lost.

But anything past a few couplets and I can feel the alarms in my head going off.

I’m a filthy free verse cheater at heart. What you’ve got is admirable.

[ponygrad]

This was pretty incredible. The story telling was more vivid than a narrative, for sure