COMES
Canto I
Come
Canto II
Before the light there was light the lands dwells grasses;
Canto IIl
Come
Canto IIll
God stood still His brilliants shun so shines
Canto IIlll
Come
Canto VI
night drops its cloak across embracement black.
Canto VIl
night drops its cloak across embracement black.
Canto VIll
Come
Canto lX
Lose He spoke life words dominance creation of light
Canto X
Before the moon and sun shown
Canto XI
No shape darkness empty everything things He spoke by dawn,
Come forth come
Canto XII
The wanderer has crossed the pass.
Canto XIII
Come
Canto XIV
Gathering in one spot cover then and withdraw from the lands
Canto XV
Continues…..
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………next chapter…..
count down
familiar six- day creation structure right you know found in other Abrahamic traditions it's the specific wording and
0:31
31 seconds
the emphasis yeah that makes it so compelling okay so let's get into those six days okay day one kicks off with
0:39
39 seconds
9/3/26
Written words by James Edward Lee Sr. 2026©
Are you sad?
Nothing but fake news
Slow and steady
Drags me down
Kids will be kids
AP: Honorable Mnetion 2025
Focus on my passion
Oasis in the dark Go ahead
Hear me now As stories might start
Life and love foretell Of celestial dreams
The bluest Incursion of death
From dream to full passion
Standing alone Seeking solace
Peace felt Caressing the eternal
Stare deep into The music beyond
Not such a thing Under a ladder
Tread gently Like nothing before
Hidden Find it all More resilient
What’s worse Worse than the evil shown
Fallen apart Finally away from them
Creature of the night As from the ashes
Depleted I’ve seen nothing new
Heard your voice From the start
Quite a ride Let the dance continue
Darkened streets All that’s seen
Imagine now With more to come
Walking with white butterflies
For a mere ounce Sensing the same
Once viewed different Don’t even try
Only if to direct Dying in the dark
All I See More than just Darkest of dreams
Willing or not Have no choice Calling Hades
Only seeing the dark Fragments of hell
Day finally come Beware the Windigo ~
(Comprised totally of titles of poems written by poet Flipsider)
AP: Honorable Mention 2025
Fragrant scent of lilac lilts through the vale,
painting the hills in His silent embrace,
Lyrics float by, searching for a home,
Their sunrise glow - the perfect rainbow-red
In divine grace that shines light from above,
He brings sunshine to the dusk of dim;
I’m a pen out of many, with which He may write.
Though all I have is a poet’s conviction
To taste new charms of heaven’s sprawl,
spilled now in ink penned to share,
~ Simple scribbles serenade me ~
My pen loves to rhyme and my parchment loves my pen,
Rippling with emotion, sometimes profound,
weeping in smudges of tearful metaphors,
nourishing thoughts into word dreams,
A slow sibilant whisper echoed from afar, a mermaid’s delight.
It is late September again.
Under a warming sun, your hand holds my hand.
Now the horizon sits – a silent spectator.
When gently huffs the wind,
twilight cascades upon my skin.
We lay in misty vapor from
dusk’s bursting promise
as ink paints a panorama of primrose.
As luminous streams of stars
paint my poetic sky,
stirring my moon-swept soul,
soft fire is his eyes.
I glow through starlight,
embracing our marrow’s warmth.
Let the strongest of winds come -
our hand hold will never end.
fruit extravaganza
dream vacation
dinner bell
a word of caution
while time waits for no one
[using titles of my 5 recent poems]
AP: 1st place 2025
"Look what they've done to my song, Ma" ~ Melanie Saftka
Act I – Pie (One bright morning)
my muse just wants pie
I huffed, “Okay, give it a try.”
Pies begin with precision,
lovely decision.
I crave a treat, a sweet delight
one that brings a smile and makes my morning bright.
The popular apple and blackberry pie
Ah, just the thought makes me sigh.
Act 2 II – Ice-cream (Two hours later, on a yummy Sundae afternoon)
what fancy leads me on to dream
of sugar plums in frozen cream
I drool o'er yummy ice cream on my tongue
Thoughts of the tasty dish makes me so long
Betwixt lucky lips my eager tongue licks
A mouth watering afternoon dish fix
With a chuckle, he swore,
"I’ll just eat one more”.
I saw American maiden with the choky breath
Panting sideways with the teary face .
I recently listned the siren of ambulance
And family sobs and I went past to her
Unfortunately, the ambulance left
It was a painful tragedy
Which made kins cried
I was anxious and tensed
When friends rosed questions about why
I could be rather be speechless
Eventhough I was questioned by my college mates
Which was unspoken incident which made
me numbed and fearful
it resulted in trauma and flashbacks
This is a painful tragedy
I could nt resist why
When I listened the wailing voices then
It made me cry
I could not forget the girl that
Was in my mind
I will wander through all the aeons and uncover all mysteries
As shepherd of the shining stars
Greek wisdom, the heavenly crescent moon
(Cento poem about Christ, using lines from the three surviving Gnostic/Naassene hymns)
On a passing cloud there floats a dream
A silent prayer
The shape of bittersweet
Solitude by the reverie
Without a string
In the dead of night
Overlapping universes
By the water's edge
How sweet it is
Borrowed bits of spirituality
Dreams are made of this
Mother Earth, my mortal muse
Matters of the heart
Music of my youth
Where have the years gone
When I close my eyes
Riding out the thunder storm
I dream a day I dream a night
However many
Time won’t wait
What if later never comes
Forever eternally
Infinity is now
A sun that never sets
(each line is a title of one of my poems)
Published in my 24-page photo/anthology ~MINDFULLY~ 2021
AP: Honorable Mention 2020
Submitted on July 8, 2019 for contest COLLABORATION OF YOUR TITLES sponsored by CHARLES MESSINA - RANKED 2ND
Cinematic overture
Masquerade ball macabre
Stories from the pages of history
The winter cemetery
Abracadabra
Mountains of Bavaria
Hungarian rhapsody
Pearls of perpetuity
Threads of deceit
Born with two left feet
The shakiest gun in the west
Dracula and the dinner guest
Chagall’s whimsy
Frost like filigree
A snowqueen tale
The end of a fairy tale
Sleeping with prince charming
A storm is brewing
Brokenhearted sunsets
Sky with no regrets
The fairy tale must end
The beginning and the end
Morning apparition
The resurrection
Wings of wonder
Mourning’s in the eye of the griever
Tribute to Kim Rodrigues - title and every line are borrowed titles of her poems. I actually have a longer version titled SEA OF CHAOS.
AP: 1st place 2022
Submitted on August 2, 2021 for contest A BRIAN STRAND RHYMED POETRY sponsored by BRIAN STRAND - RANKED 1ST
and on September 14, 2025 for contest CENTO FAVES sponsored by CRYSTAL WOODS - RANKED 2ND
Introduction
The first pleasure of reading a cento often arrives as a double recognition: a line may carry the authority of an earlier context while behaving unexpectedly in its new surroundings. Meaning migrates at every seam. Read side by side, these poems reveal how differently poets can turn selection and arrangement into argument, atmosphere, character, or emotional discovery.
As you browse the community poems, you may encounter polished continuity, conspicuous collision, comic mismatch, solemn tribute, or a deliberately unstable chorus. One poet may draw from a tightly related group of sources, while another may welcome sharp differences in diction, period, mood, or worldview. Some arrangements invite readers to forget the source texts temporarily; others keep the sensation of quotation near the surface. Both approaches can be compelling when the resulting poem develops a clear imaginative pressure.
Reading beyond the first example makes the poet's authorship easier to perceive. It lies not only in what is gathered, but also in what is omitted, repeated, placed in opposition, delayed, or reserved for the ending. Compare several poets' approaches to transitions, source acknowledgment, sonic texture, and the construction of a composite speaker. The collection becomes especially rewarding when read as a set of distinct conversations with other writing. Each poem offers its own answer to a central creative question: how can inherited language be made to carry a new necessity without losing the resonance of where it has been?
Reading Guide
A cento asks for two kinds of attention at once. You can follow the new poem as an independent experience, yet remain alert to changes in register, syntax, image, and cultural resonance that suggest other voices beneath it. Source recognition can enrich the reading, but it should not become the only test of success. As you read the community poems, first experience each poem without investigating its references; then revisit any source information and notice what changes.
- Examine the seams. Watch pronouns, verb tenses, sentence boundaries, and changes in diction where one selection meets another. A seam can create continuity or productive friction. Ask: does this transition clarify the new poem's movement, or make the reader pause for a meaningful reason?
- Listen for the composite speaker. Borrowed voices may merge into one persuasive consciousness or remain audibly plural. Either effect can suit the poem. Ask: who seems to be speaking now, and does that identity become steadier, more divided, or more mysterious as the poem proceeds?
- Study the new relationships between lines. In a cento, adjacency is interpretive. A consoling statement can become ironic beside an image of damage. Ask: what meaning exists because these particular lines have been made neighbors?
- Follow the sound across sources. Notice recurring consonants, vowels, rhythms, and sentence lengths. Sonic links can bind contrasting language, while abrupt changes can stage conflict. Ask: where does the ear detect harmony, and where does it detect a deliberate break?
- Trace image development. Strong arrangements often allow an object, color, landscape, or bodily sensation to gather significance. Ask: do the images merely accumulate, or does each one alter how the previous images are understood?
- Observe pace and silence. Stanza divisions, punctuation, and white space can slow a crowded chorus or accelerate a chain of associations. Ask: where is the reader given time to absorb a collision, and where is momentum more important than explanation?
- Test the ending against the opening. The final selection may resolve the assembled voice, fracture it, or send the reader back to reconsider the beginning. Ask: has the closing line earned a new meaning within this arrangement, rather than functioning only as a memorable quotation?
After reading several examples, compare not only which sources were chosen, but what each poet made those sources do. The most illuminating differences often appear in transitions, tonal turns, and closure.
Writing Tips
Approach a cento as both curator and dramatist. Gathering striking language is only the preliminary work; composition begins when one selection creates pressure on another. Before arranging the draft, decide what kind of experience you want to build: a changing speaker, an argument, a scene, an elegy, a comic escalation, or a sequence of images. That purpose should guide the search without making the result feel predetermined.
- Choose a source constellation with generative tension. Material connected by an author, subject, period, or image can provide coherence. Material with sharper differences can produce debate or surprise. Select the field according to the emotional task rather than choosing sources solely because they are admired.
- Harvest for function, not fame. A common beginner mistake is collecting only self-contained, celebrated lines. Such lines may resist relationship because each arrives already complete. Also gather quieter transitions, concrete details, verbs, questions, and tonal pivots that can help the new poem move.
- Build an arc before polishing the joints. Lay selections out physically or digitally and test several orders. Look for escalation, reversal, discovery, or deepening. Formal compliance cannot rescue a sequence that remains emotionally static; the reader needs a reason to continue beyond recognizing the collage principle.
- Make grammatical pressure intentional. Track every pronoun, tense, implied setting, and addressee. A sudden shift can announce another consciousness, but an accidental shift merely confuses. When a needed transition cannot be made cleanly, search for a different selection rather than forcing incompatible language into place.
- Use sound as hidden stitching. Echoed vowels, consonants, stresses, and sentence cadences can create kinship between distant sources. Conversely, a rough sonic border can mark disagreement or rupture. Read provisional sequences aloud before deciding that they belong together.
- Develop an image system. Repeated water, doors, weather, animals, or colors can give the arrangement an internal memory. Avoid adding images simply because they are beautiful. Ask what each image changes: does it intensify the subject, redirect it, or expose a contradiction?
- Control density and breathing room. Continuous brilliance can become exhausting. Use stanza placement, punctuation, and variation in syntactic length to shape attention. A pause after a charged juxtaposition may be more powerful than another immediately impressive line.
- Earn the final selection. Do not rely on a familiar or grand statement to supply automatic closure. Test endings that answer, overturn, narrow, or reopen the poem. The strongest choice often feels newly inevitable because the preceding arrangement has transformed its implications.
- Keep a precise source record. Record authors, works, publication information, and the exact wording as you gather material. Provide clear acknowledgment, and check copyright status, permissions, and publication requirements before sharing. Ethical transparency supports rather than diminishes the poem's originality.
During revision, print the draft without its source notes and read it aloud as though every line were unfamiliar. Mark places where the voice blurs unintentionally, the pace stalls, images compete, or syntax calls attention to the assembly without artistic purpose. Then read it again with the sources visible. Revise until both experiences matter: the poem should sustain an independent movement while rewarding awareness of the language it has brought into conversation.
Interesting Facts
- Recognition is optional, resonance is not. A reader may know none of the source material and still experience a coherent emotional or intellectual movement. Recognition adds another layer, but it cannot substitute for compelling arrangement.
- A visible seam can be an achievement. Smoothness is only one aesthetic. A sharp collision between styles may dramatize divided identity, historical distance, disagreement, or comic incongruity. The question is whether the rupture performs meaningful work.
- Selection reveals an individual voice. Even when the verbal material comes from elsewhere, taste becomes visible through omission, sequence, recurrence, and contrast. Two poets working with the same source field could construct radically different speakers and implications.
- Source notes can create a second reading experience. Reading the poem first and its acknowledgments afterward may reveal reversals, hidden dialogues, or shifts in context. Documentation can therefore function as an interpretive map as well as an ethical record.
- Performance changes the perceived assembly. A single steady delivery may fuse the voices, while pauses, tonal shifts, or changes in emphasis can expose their plurality. Reading aloud helps determine whether those differences should be concealed, balanced, or dramatized.
- Length changes the form's pressure. A brief cento may depend on one electric juxtaposition. A longer one must sustain development across many acts of borrowing, making pacing, motif, and structural turns increasingly important.
- Comparison reveals more than compliance. As you browse the poems in this collection, notice how different writers establish necessity. One may privilege narrative, another sonic pattern, another argument or atmosphere. These contrasts show why the form cannot be judged by assembly alone.
Popular Themes
Subject matter in a cento is inseparable from the prior lives of its language. A theme can be carried not only by literal statement, but by the tension between source contexts and the new arrangement. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not statistical rankings of the community collection.
- Memory and recollection. Language retrieved from other works resembles memory itself: partial, rearranged, and altered by present need. Repeated images or phrases can suggest how the past returns differently each time it is encountered.
- Grief and elegy. A chorus of inherited voices can hold absence without requiring a single speaker to explain it completely. Fragments may feel like surviving traces, while the movement from source to source can enact searching, remembrance, or attempted consolation.
- Love and intimacy. Familiar declarations can become tender, ironic, hesitant, or newly vulnerable when placed in unexpected company. Contrasting registers also allow a poem to show the difference between idealized romance and lived emotional complexity.
- Identity and multiplicity. A composite speaker is well suited to exploring selves shaped by family, culture, reading, expectation, and contradiction. Changes in pronoun or tone can dramatize competing identities without reducing them to a single explanation.
- Tribute and literary conversation. A focused selection can honor a writer or group of writers while also questioning, extending, or reframing their concerns. The most effective tributes create a new encounter rather than merely displaying admiration.
- Public witness and collective experience. Multiple voices can place private feeling beside broader social language, revealing conflict between official narratives and lived experience. This use requires careful sourcing and acknowledgment, especially when the selected words arise from suffering or historically marginalized perspectives.
- Dream, myth, and transformation. Abrupt transitions between images can feel natural within dream logic, while resonant source language can give a contemporary concern a larger symbolic field. Recurring motifs keep the transformation purposeful rather than merely strange.
Read several community poems that approach related subjects and compare their methods. One poet may create continuity, another interruption; one may seek homage, another critique. Similar themes become distinct through source choice, sequence, tone, and the meanings produced at each seam.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a cento lies between dependence and invention. Every selection arrives with prior music and implication, yet the finished poem must create an experience that cannot be reduced to its ingredients. A technically recognizable draft demonstrates that language has been gathered and arranged. A memorable poem makes the act of gathering feel necessary: the subject itself seems to require several textual memories, competing registers, or inherited voices. Borrowing then becomes an expressive condition rather than a decorative premise.
Editors tend to notice whether each adjacency changes the pressure of the poem. A line should do more than follow another attractively; it might contradict, intensify, reinterpret, or expose what its neighbor leaves unsaid. Strong centos often develop on two levels at once. Their surface movement remains intelligible to readers unfamiliar with the sources, while knowledge of those sources creates additional irony, tenderness, critique, or historical depth. Sound, syntax, image, and pacing help hold these levels together. Smooth transitions can produce an uncanny unified speaker, whereas carefully placed fractures can make plurality audible.
Weaker drafts frequently mistake recognizability for achievement. A sequence of famous lines may become a literary scavenger hunt, especially if the selections are individually memorable but collectively static. Other drafts over-explain their references, forcing the poem to announce connections that arrangement should make perceptible. Mechanical alternation among sources can also become predictable when it does not serve a changing argument. Forced syntax, unmotivated tonal jumps, excessive density, and endings chosen for borrowed grandeur rather than earned closure all reveal a structure imposed from outside the poem. The remedy is not always greater smoothness; it is clearer intention at every joint.
Individuality remains visible through attention. What a poet notices in the source material, which voices are granted space, what patterns recur, where silence enters, and how the final selection revises the opening all constitute authorship. Ethical acknowledgment also shapes the reader's trust and clarifies the poem's relationship to its materials. Comparing multiple community poems is particularly instructive because quality does not depend on one preferred degree of seamlessness or difficulty. Read beyond the first example and ask which arrangements alter your understanding as they proceed. The strongest examples leave the source language carrying a burden, question, or emotional consequence it could not have carried in isolation.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on an idea of what a cento can accomplish. Compare how each poet handles seams, composite voice, source resonance, tonal contrast, and closure. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a particular transition, image pattern, sonic echo, or surprising new context.
Then try assembling a poem of your own. Keep careful source notes, revise for an independent emotional movement, and publish the finished work on PoetrySoup when it is ready. Your arrangement can join the collection's ongoing conversation between individual imagination and inherited language.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 132 poems, providing ample room to read beyond a single model and compare distinct interpretations. Across a collection of this size, visitors can consider how poets may follow established expectations, adapt them to a particular subject, or challenge them through visible seams, unusual source relationships, and different approaches to voice, pacing, and closure.
Sub Categories
Definition | What is Cento in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.