Sensing enjoyed company absorbs certain aspired mastery
Apropos bonding, bending, dancing, singing, respect remains
Embrace honesty, ensures unmoved beliefs, revered culture
Honored parents, sibling commend, recalls elderly picture
Harmony, ethical balance, promote oneness despite anarchy
Worldly pursuit defying humanly purpose deplete synergy
Justice upholds freedom, defined moments express liberty
Broken Charger
My phone at 1%
Love's battery runs empty
Who gon' charge me now?
Dusk hums low again
I scroll through old convos-sigh.
Ghosts read ''typing...still''
(Sedoka)
Drum
Beat
heart loud
in freedom
rising,broken-
dance!
(Lantern poem)
Mzantsi Bus Stop
Minibus honks, dust rise high-
vendors shout,wives wave koebaai.
Wind smells like pap stew.
prayer and perfume too-
Time flies-
So do I
(Clogyrnach)
Heilbron Love Song
She wears my T-shirt.
Famo music follows her hips.
streets lights blink approval.
I forget my sorrows
The world dances small.
(Gogyohka)
Truth
Revolutions begin the day you whisper, ''enough''.
(monostich)
Taxi Ride To Wepenaar
Rain drops on glass so slow
city lights blink-I see hope glow
(Luc Bat poem)
Wi-Fi Gospel
No signal again,
but somehow Jesus still calls
bless the hotspot Lord
(zappai poem)
Roaring African Diamond, Rolling Thunder, Beloved Warrior—
Cotton’s Violent Cr-owner craving Tougher, Blacker Pickers
praying Brother, Sisters, Mothers, Fathers couldn’t recover
Delight, Comfort, Dignity, Respect, Fortune, Majesty… covered
Blinded Visions, Inhuman Vitriol flowing through Uncivil
Society. Grander Savages casting Shallow Shadows; Ignoble
Secrets. Darkest Templar, Limited Freedom belongs Nowhere.
Doctor blinks, breath caught, face goes still.
“Oh,” he says, voice sharp, split.
Hands tremble near charts, numbers all wrong.
Room spins quiet, cold like a grave.
Chest tightens, heartbeat thuds, loud, slow.
How long have I lived this broken?
Sick laughs die. Fear lives in bone.
Never really know what part of Sunday’s
sermon my mind’s eye will lock hold
What portion of the Holy Story will
ignite passion as Pastor’s lucid homoly unfolds
“I DARE YOU TO PRAISE HIM CHURCH!”
and Good Lawd did that church explode
and I sat at the red light -Exposed.
Bill Marable
12-4-22
11:00 am
A reckoning, daring taunt bestowed
my weariness, a covenant catering
to the boundary, of self why I'd become
more open to resolve, life's issues
abundantly, as though life was simply,
a passing fancy, cleverly orchestrated
to be rehearsed, over and over again
while I'd gravely, excepted a single
faint hue, as a quaint challenge
flowing as a heavenly hue edifying,
a sheer witnessing, the pondering
whims that gathered beyond,
St. John Paul passages, of hidden
messages, morbidly explored casually
expressed, graphically in stone.
Family’s purpose respond consent concord harmony oneness
Licenses aptitude ability qualify oneness harmony
Collect travail attempt struggle respond oneness
Ujamaa’s service product consume society produce various
Impetus intents apropos purpose fitting resolve mission
Fertile inspire imagine product qualify oneness harmony
Believe loyalty ability fitting resolve mission oneness
11/22/2023
Written words by James Edward Lee Sr. 2023©
Your arm is Soft like sponge pillow,
Heavy is the head that rests on;
Soft but strong, made me embrace loner.
Serene voice is all you got, deary!
Your oxygen the fairy has breathe,gem!
This being none have seen; pretty shorty.
How I wish this was not...pseudo.
The poems I never wrote are
all here on my page on this site
I mean it
I plagiarised every one of them
from some wannabe poet
that got expelled back in pre school
I’ve an excellent memory
and am a recalcitrant liar
But now I’m coming clean
No time for homework
I just wanted to play
Teacher beat me badly
for wasting my life away
I enjoyed my childhood
those were the days
Still to win this contest
a backhander I will pay
Poem below is my own
so now I’ll have my say
Ba Ba black sheep
have hue - buckled my shoe
Three four -the cow jumped-
everywhere a moo moo!
The end
The Poems I Never Wrote Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Craig Cornish
Hue gave this an N/A
Tackled by a stutter murmur of Deus.
The praying ended and packed as threats.
Err, umm, uhh, were cliched by vomits.
Grasped all the needs and rusty flirts.
Prune back Sheoak! The cutest green pine.
Pity Sheoak no more green crown again.
Where are Quechua and Sherpa? They go.
I see a girl in the mirror
A thing of beauty unseen by all
She weaves poetry, and cooks sublime notions
Paints the sky green, the land blue
Twirls on cliffs, tiptoes along its edges
Drama, risks, thrills, that is her life
A thing of beauty unsung by all.
K.S.Lakshmi
Image of South Africa Cape Town Table provided by Pixabay
Token Steps
Ruling winds the austral buttes naked slopes ...
as vortex smoky rise aloft Zulu's kraal
Clans in circular indlu huts enclosing round
all women famous to craft their beads
while getting set for tomorrows Reed Dance
a trait of Zulu armistice Nguni extends
Bestill, war drums eve chants Shaka's hopes ...
2021 May 29
There are all kinds of raw fish
that can be used to make sushi.
Orange salmon is quite popular these days.
Try mahi mahi or yellow fin tuna.
Mackerel, and caviar both red and black
Shrimp and surimi are still in demand.
Please don't give me any sea urchin.
In the bush the dancing begins early
Leather drums call from far and near.
Steady rhythms mark timed steps, and
Swahili is proudly spoken here; come
Join festive reveler from the village,
Flee to the running brook you see
Asante for being here...for being alive!
Listed #51 in Top 100 Poems
on Poetry Soup
March 23, 2021
Listed #61 in Top 100 Poems
on Poetry Soup
March 7, 2021
HONORABLE MENTION
Poetry Contest - All Poetry
sponsored by Kwame Cunningham
July 26, 2021
***NOTE: Poem posted on the above video. If you need to read it again, just right click on the video and then click on 'Loop' on the top of the drop-down menu, whereto, the video will continue to scroll.
SONG: 'Run To You', by Kaue Penna
VIDEO: The Voice Kids (2020)
POEM: 'Adolescence: Apollo's Aria' - [Kwansaba Form]
2020 December 12
By Will K
"Mele Kalikimaka"
ALOHA!
Introduction
The pleasure of reading Kwansabas side by side comes from watching abundance press against a narrow verbal frame. One poet may make praise ceremonial and public; another may approach it through a quiet portrait, a family memory, a scene of shared labor, or an image charged with grief. Because every word must earn its place, small differences in diction, syntax, and emphasis become unusually visible.
The form's cultural relationship to communal values and praise gives that compression purpose. A person, neighborhood, tradition, achievement, or principle can be honored through concrete details rather than general admiration. The compact vocabulary encourages direct verbs and memorable nouns, while the absence of an end-rhyme obligation leaves poets free to build music through cadence, consonance, repetition, and strategic pauses. Some writers may favor declarative strength; others may use questions, fragments, narrative movement, or a turn from hardship toward affirmation.
As you read the community poems, notice how differently poets distribute attention across the sevenfold design. One may build by accumulation, placing image beside image until a larger portrait appears. Another may create a miniature argument or reserve its strongest recognition for the final line. Reading beyond the first example reveals which qualities belong to the shared form and which arise from an individual voice. Comparison also makes formal choices easier to appreciate: where a poet compresses, where the poem breathes, what it praises, and how its ending changes the meaning of everything before it.
Reading Guide
A Kwansaba rewards two kinds of attention at once: attention to its disciplined verbal surface and attention to the act of recognition beneath that surface. Do not read only to confirm that the visible pattern is present. Listen for what the pressure of that pattern makes sharper, stranger, or more memorable. When browsing the poems in this collection, compare not merely the subjects chosen but the ways poets convert admiration, cultural memory, principle, struggle, and communal feeling into distinct dramatic movements.
- Identify the object of regard. Praise may be directed toward a person, a people, a practice, a place, or an sustaining value. It may also contain grief, protest, or correction. Ask: what exactly is being honored, and does the poem make that worth visible through evidence?
- Examine the compact diction. The form's verbal restrictions can favor plain, forceful words, but simplicity need not mean vagueness. Notice whether verbs carry energy and nouns provide texture. Ask: does each word feel chosen for precision, or merely selected because it fits?
- Read each line as a pressure unit. A compact line can deliver a statement, suspend a thought, or push syntax forward. End words therefore receive extra weight. Compare where poets complete a phrase and where they use continuation. Ask: how does the line ending control anticipation?
- Listen beyond rhyme. Music may arise from repeated consonants, vowel echoes, parallel phrasing, stress, or recurring key words. Read the poem aloud and ask: which sound pattern binds the lines without becoming a sing-song distraction?
- Trace the sevenfold movement. The design can behave like a sequence of steps, a widening circle, a compact narrative, or a ceremonial list. Ask: does each new line deepen the poem, or does it repeat an idea without adding pressure?
- Look for cultural specificity. Broad claims about unity or pride become persuasive when grounded in gesture, work, speech, food, music, names, places, or remembered acts. Ask: what details make the praise lived rather than merely announced?
- Test the final line. Closure may bless, challenge, dedicate, surprise, or return to an earlier image with changed meaning. Compare several poets' approaches and ask: does the ending complete the poem's emotional movement rather than simply stop the count?
After reading several Kwansabas, return to the one that stayed with you. Its lasting force may come from a single image, a cadence, an honest complication, or a final act of recognition. Naming that source of force makes comparison more meaningful.
Writing Tips
Begin a Kwansaba as an act of focused regard, not as a counting exercise. Choose someone or something you can see from more than one angle, then decide what your praise must reveal. The strongest drafts often hold admiration beside difficulty: endurance implies pressure, unity implies difference, and faith matters because doubt exists. Let the form concentrate this complexity rather than flatten it into a slogan.
- Choose material with several facets. A subject suited to the sevenfold space can unfold through action, image, memory, consequence, and value. A vague topic such as strength may remain abstract; one person repairing a porch after a storm gives strength a body, setting, and task.
- Define the kind of praise you intend. Celebration can be intimate, civic, ancestral, playful, elegiac, or defiant. Decide who is speaking, to whom, and on what occasion. This choice controls whether the voice should sound like testimony, address, portrait, invocation, or quiet reflection.
- Respect the cultural grounding. The form's connection to African American communal principles should be treated as meaningful context, not decorative atmosphere. Write from knowledge and honest relationship. If your subject lies outside that context, avoid imitation or borrowed cultural markers and let the form's values guide your attention responsibly.
- Draft freely before compressing. Write a short paragraph containing the scene, key actions, sensory details, and emotional turn. Then distill it. Beginning with a grid often produces filler, inverted grammar, or empty adjectives; compression works better when there is already rich material to compress.
- Build a useful word bank. Gather vivid verbs, concrete objects, sensory terms, and important names before arranging lines. Treat compact words as sources of force rather than limitations. Do not use a name merely as a convenient escape from pressure; give it emotional or cultural weight.
- Make syntax serve the lineation. Some lines can stand as firm declarations, while others can carry thought across the break. Avoid seven disconnected packets that all sound alike. Vary sentence length, grammatical shape, and punctuation so the poem can breathe within its repeated measure.
- Create music without chasing end sounds. Use consonance, vowel echoes, parallel clauses, and repeated key terms to establish cohesion. Read the draft aloud at a natural speaking pace. If the language becomes stiff or chant-like without purpose, revise the stress pattern rather than adding ornamental words.
- Plan progression and closure. Give each line a distinct job: establish, embody, complicate, widen, turn, or conclude. Common beginner drafts spend most of their space restating praise and then attach a moral. Instead, let the final line emerge from the images and actions already present.
During revision, check artistic necessity before technical compliance. Mark the strongest image, the most active verb, the emotional turn, and the word that should resonate last. Remove explanations that merely tell readers what the concrete details already show. Only then verify the pattern word by word. Read once for accuracy, once for cadence, and once as an ordinary reader who does not know the rules. The finished poem should feel shaped by discipline, not trapped inside it.
Interesting Facts
- Arithmetic can intensify feeling rather than cool it. The repeated measure may look mathematical on the page, yet it can create ceremonial steadiness, controlled anger, patient remembrance, or accumulating joy. The emotional effect depends on what the poet makes the pattern carry.
- Short diction need not produce a small idea. Compact words are often among the language's oldest and most forceful. When arranged with care, they can give a Kwansaba the directness of speech, prayer, witness, or public declaration without sacrificing complexity.
- Praise becomes more credible when it includes pressure. Honoring courage is stronger when readers glimpse the danger faced; celebrating unity gains depth when division remains possible. A shadow in the poem can clarify the value of what is praised rather than weaken it.
- Names can act as structural anchors. A person's or place's name may carry history, affection, identity, and sound at once. Within a compressed field, that density gives a name unusual gravity, especially when nearby details show why it deserves remembrance.
- The pattern is partly visual and partly audible. A listener may not consciously count the design during a reading, so cadence, parallel phrasing, and pauses must communicate coherence. A page-perfect draft can still need sonic revision before it feels complete when spoken.
- The same frame can support opposite motions. One poet may move outward from an individual toward a community, while another may narrow a public principle into one private gesture. Both movements can make the ending feel earned, but they produce different kinds of recognition.
- Comparison exposes invisible decisions. Reading several community interpretations reveals how much freedom remains inside shared constraints. Differences in sentence shape, address, imagery, silence, and closure help readers distinguish the form's identity from any single poet's method.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form meet most powerfully when the poem's sevenfold concentration echoes the values or relationships being explored. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not claims about which themes occur most often in this collection. Each can support praise while leaving room for tension, story, and individual perspective.
- Community and unity. A sequence of compact lines can gather separate people, gestures, or voices into a collective portrait. Unity then appears through connected details rather than through an unsupported declaration.
- Self-determination. Decisive verbs and controlled progression suit poems about naming oneself, choosing a path, resisting imposed limits, or claiming authority. Formal discipline can mirror the speaker's purposeful movement.
- Shared work and mutual care. Cooking, teaching, building, organizing, tending, and exchanging resources provide active scenes. The form can honor cooperation by showing how many modest acts contribute to one sustaining result.
- Family and ancestral memory. Brief images can hold inherited sayings, objects, skills, names, and rituals. Compression gives each remembered detail the quality of an emblem while the larger pattern links past action to present identity.
- Artistic creation. Music, dance, visual art, storytelling, and craft fit a design that values deliberate making. A poet can mirror the artist being praised by turning limited materials into rhythm, surprise, and expressive form.
- Faith, endurance, and the future. The steady architecture can sound meditative or resolute, making it useful for movement from uncertainty toward trust. Concrete signs of endurance keep faith from becoming abstract assurance.
- Place and cultural belonging. Streets, homes, gathering spaces, landscapes, foods, and local speech can create a vivid geography of belonging. Carefully selected details allow a small verbal field to suggest a much larger communal world.
As you read the community poems, compare how writers transform related themes through different scales and voices. One may make unity public and ceremonial; another may locate it in a single act of care. Similar subjects become distinct poems when image, stance, movement, and closure arise from lived particulars.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a Kwansaba lies between visible control and emotional abundance. Its framework can tempt a writer to treat success as completion of a verbal grid, yet readers remember something else: a presence made vivid, a value embodied, or a phrase whose cadence seems inevitable. Technical recognition is only the threshold. The deeper achievement occurs when compression concentrates regard, so that the form appears necessary to the poem's act of praise rather than attached after the subject has been chosen.
Strong examples make every kind of restriction productive. Compact diction can create moral clarity, but it can also sharpen ambiguity when a plain word carries several meanings. Repeated measure can suggest solidarity, ritual, persistence, or disciplined resistance. Line endings can place pressure on a name, action, or image, while syntax flowing across those endings can prevent the poem from sounding boxed in. Editors and attentive readers notice when these features reinforce the subject: communal labor may be rendered through linked actions, remembrance through accumulating details, or determination through clauses that advance without retreat.
Weakness appears when the machinery becomes more visible than the poem. Forced word order, expendable modifiers, padded phrases, and mechanically similar lines often signal that compliance has displaced thought. Predictability is another risk, especially when every line offers a broad virtue without scene, conflict, or sensory evidence. Over-explanation can be equally damaging; after an image has demonstrated care or courage, a concluding lesson may reduce its resonance. At the other extreme, compression may leave the subject insufficiently developed, providing names and claims without enough context for readers to feel why the praise matters.
Individuality survives through stance, not through evasion of convention. One poet may speak directly to the honored subject; another may build a portrait from observed actions. A voice can be tender, prophetic, humorous, grieving, restrained, or defiant while remaining responsive to the form's communal and celebratory grounding. Browse the poems in this collection with those distinctions in mind. Comparing several approaches develops a more reliable sense of quality than treating one example as a template: readers begin to recognize when variation has purpose, when an ending has been prepared, and when formal pressure has transformed familiar language into memorable speech.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first Kwansaba and allow the poems to illuminate one another. Compare what each poet chooses to honor, how the lines gather momentum, where concrete detail replaces general praise, and what emotional work the ending performs. If a poem stays with you, leave a thoughtful comment about a particular image, sound, turn, or act of recognition.
Then try composing your own. Approach the pattern as a way to concentrate attention rather than merely test accuracy, revise it aloud, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can extend the conversation while honoring the form's cultural grounding.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 18 Kwansabas, offering readers multiple interpretations to examine side by side. A collection of this size makes it possible to compare subjects, voices, imagery, pacing, and approaches to closure without assuming that one poem represents the whole form. As you browse, remember that individual poets may closely follow conventions, adapt them for a particular artistic purpose, or challenge reader expectations while retaining a recognizable relationship to the form.
Kwansaba Categories
Definition | What is Kwansaba 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.