Forelsket feelings from celestia,
let yourself fall into that blessing.
Cassette mix created just for you,
may coax us into undressing.
Pillow talk so soft and savage,
slow down get a little deeper.
Intro lines are not needed now,
blow me kisses make my soul stir.
Dearest Ancestors, elders, concerned with the ways of the world,
Clearest for you, the pain you know, you see again unfurled.
Disappointed in the dream you once held when young,
It's annointed to us now, even if our feeling's wrong.
Wisdom you wish you could wield as your strength has waned
Hear it in the children, when they once more say: we hope to gain!
Oma, you have worked and loved and lived in good faith,
So I, want you to know, youth's reach is in its wake.
Lento Soup - 9-1-26
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Autumn's Amber Breath
Sweet autumn's amber breath completes
Bittersweet's return, upbeat
Among the aster, so far flung,
Unsung glory in her harvest tongue.
On golden seas of sunflower swans
Dawn's soft sighs ripple, like chiffon
In rhythmic waves fall's silver grin
Spins the scarlet season's love-in.
Weaving shade, nuance, deft subtle plots,
Leaving wry joke, ink commas, dots
dreams on script unfold, imbued with life,
schemes and clued-in darting figures now rife.
Taunting twist and turn in tale, pivot point,
teasing lavish scene, a buttressed hinged-joint,
matters key, core, glib, lax in broad domain,
scatters glee, sound hint, deep echo’s gold chain
I sought, in silence, solace and peace,
by which, my dank soul cried 'release'.
From pent up ridicule, guilt and shame,
long nights of torment, I wept Christ's Name.
I wept Christ, as lies pierced my mind,
my sombre spirit poised to - walk the line.
Instead I battled through decades of pain,
led now, to step out, and enjoy the rain.
09.01.2026
('The perpetual black dog, has one but cure,
That is, Christ Jesus, for that I'm sure'. - prayers welcomed )
Grace divine makes me triumphantly glow
Race in life I can win midst trials' blow
Freed from fear of insecurity's blight
Creed with good deed radiates faith's delight.
Heart thanks God for blessed victorious gain
Part in sharing love, joy and peace will reign
Hope prevails while compassion works with zest
Scope yon sharing reaches all to be blest.
Accepted have I
inspected close by
The liquor offered by life
Sea of it's offered in rife.
My role, it's given.
High of sinking has me driven
To accept it ever so slowly
Too despised is water, too holy.
Entry for Lento Soup Poetry Contest. Charles Messina
I thought if I could learn to walk
Try to listen to the words I talk
The pain may leave my body and heart
Be free like I was, from the start
So I barhed, relaxed, ate healthy too
Know that I must face what's true
Sure, it does take time to try
Cure myself and let my body cry
8/30/26
(C)opyright
Into deep hours...when twilight sparks
Dew wisps, flaring all bright monarchs,
Tender comes dark reeling a hum
There, air-tossed wings, on glide,succumb.
Butterflies through eve's lull... I hear
Sighs waft of low taps, quite revere ;
Whispering mild as feathers flow
Lingering through spring's dance, aglow !
~ not for contest
Perhaps, once unlocked, one finds
Apps are rooms behind the blinds
Wallpapers comfort the eyes
Echo-chambers respin lies
Trash can always be retrieved
Flashed memories, not believed
More and more, you are alone
You're always home with your phone
In spring the thaw begins to creep,
Thin winter’s hold, soon starts to sleep,
Quiet murmuring, slow and deep,
Secrets that rivers rarely keep.
Earth awakes from its desired rest,
Rebirth of lawns and trees redessed,
Soothing breeze greets the tender chest,
Heralding promise to be blessed.
Just a stroke of violet paint
Stuck in a cage, far from quaint
When creative bickers with reason
It's no longer artistry season
The cure to this block of mind
Is something each person must find
If ample rest doesn't do the trick
Then find your niche, nice and quick!
Lost in wondering who I am today,
Cost of living for the current day.
Pictures of myself looking like a stranger,
Fixtures of typical I perceived as danger.
Tossed straight into the frigid bay,
Crossed easily by those who know the way.
Strictures of expectations, 'you must change her'.
Scriptures, theirs; an itchy manger.
Lento is the rhythm our hearts once beat.
Mementos we idealized from the past.
Tempos orchestrate our crushing defeat
Crescendos into what could never last.
Of course, we loved the blessed symphony
Endorsed sacred songs mutually shared.
Divorce brought along its cacophony
Forced a melody of chaos unrepaired.
Judges and lawyers pulling wicked strings
Trudges to the beat of our tragic age.
Grudges hammering the half-notes that sting
Besmudges our reputations with rage.
We shall forever cherish the sweet lento.
The easy swing of love so compliant.
Sheet music must come to an end though.
Be in separate beds lone and silent.
Geese take off into the crystal bluish sky
These birds soar weightless in the air so high
Glide along with the murmuring wind
Slide over oceans leaving familiar territory behind
They cover miles with wind under their wings
Hey listen, their loud honking, like trumpet rings
Moving clouds oft shut them out from sight
Grooving, they give the feel of wispy dreams in flight.
Introduction
The quickest pleasure in reading Lentos side by side comes from hearing how sound enters at two different thresholds. The opening words can chime before each line has revealed its thought, while selected line endings create a second pattern of expectation and return. That double attention makes even a brief poem feel active: the reader listens forward for meaning and backward for echoes.
As you browse the community poems, notice how much variety can occupy the form's compact, two-stanza space. One poet may turn the opening sounds into a playful verbal flourish; another may use them like an incantation, an argument, or a sequence of emotional steps. Because line length is comparatively flexible, the movement may be clipped and conversational, broad and meditative, or deliberately uneven. Some writers may intensify the end-rhyming, while others preserve more room for natural speech. These choices affect whether the poem feels buoyant, solemn, intimate, comic, or tense.
Reading only one example can make an individual solution look like the form's only solution. Reading beyond the first example reveals the more interesting question: how does each poet negotiate sound without sacrificing sense? Compare the transitions between stanzas, the degree of sonic emphasis, and the kind of closure each writer creates. The collection becomes especially valuable when poems are treated not as interchangeable demonstrations, but as distinct answers to the same compositional pressure.
Reading Guide
A useful way to read a Lento is to follow two experiences at once. First, receive the poem as speech, image, story, or reflection. Then listen for the network of sound guiding that experience. The opening-word echoes are unusually exposed because they arrive before syntax can disguise them, while the answering end sounds exert pressure on where lines come to rest. As you read the community poems, consider whether these features merely announce the form or help shape the poem's emotional logic.
- Listen to the line openings. Notice whether the first words create an incantation, a comic sequence, a chain of contrasts, or a gradual change in thought. Their position gives them immediate emphasis. Ask: do the opening echoes deepen the poem's movement, or are they mainly decorative?
- Observe the route to each rhyme. A convincing end sound feels earned by the sentence rather than reached through inversion, padding, or an unlikely word choice. Compare several poets' approaches and ask: does the rhyme sharpen the statement, introduce surprise, or make the language sound constrained?
- Track the stanza turn. The break offers a natural place for a change of scene, speaker, tone, tense, or understanding. It can also continue an unresolved thought. Ask: what becomes possible after the pause that was not possible before it?
- Compare rhythmic character. Flexible line length allows one Lento to move briskly and another to unfold expansively. Listen for pauses, stresses, and sentence boundaries rather than counting mechanically. Ask: does the rhythm support the voice, and where does it intentionally disturb the flow?
- Watch for sonic density. Some poets may add further rhyme, alliteration, or internal echo; others may keep the required sound pattern more isolated. Extra music can create exuberance or intensify pressure, but it can also crowd the meaning. Ask: how much sound does this subject need?
- Study the final line's work. Because the poem has established several anticipations in a short space, the ending may satisfy, redirect, or complicate them. Ask whether the last line closes only the sound pattern or also completes an image, argument, emotional turn, or dramatic moment.
On a second reading, try speaking each poem aloud. The ear often detects the difference between living music and visible pattern more clearly than the eye. Comparing those audible choices across the collection will deepen your understanding of what the form can hold.
Writing Tips
Begin a Lento with an experience that can develop through both echo and change. The form rewards material with a clear emotional or imaginative hinge: expectation giving way to recognition, a scene acquiring new meaning, or one voice answering another. Before settling every rhyme, decide what the first stanza needs to establish and what the second must alter. That dramatic plan keeps the sound pattern in service to the poem rather than allowing it to become the poem's only event.
- Choose material with a compact arc. A vast subject such as grief, nature, or love becomes more workable when located in one gesture, object, exchange, or remembered instant. The two-stanza span can then move from observation to implication. Ask what can genuinely change within this brief frame.
- Build an opening-word bank with semantic range. Gather possible rhyming words, but do not choose them by sound alone. Look for words that can launch different grammatical actions: a noun, a command, an adverb, a name, or a question. Variety prevents the line openings from becoming a parade of near-synonymous fillers.
- Draft the sentence before forcing its landing. Write what each line needs to mean in plain language, then search for a natural route toward the relevant end sound. This reduces backward syntax and vague padding. A rhyme is strongest when it appears inevitable after arrival but was not predictable several words in advance.
- Use flexible line length deliberately. A longer line may accommodate reflection, qualification, or accumulating imagery; a short one may deliver shock, wit, or certainty. Do not let line lengths fluctuate only because one rhyme required more explanation. Give each expansion or contraction an audible purpose.
- Control the amount of additional music. Full end-rhyme, internal rhyme, consonance, and alliteration can make the poem exuberant, songlike, or comic. They can also blur important words. If the opening echoes are already prominent, consider quieter diction elsewhere so that the reader has somewhere to rest.
- Let the stanza break perform an action. Use the pause to reveal consequence, contradict an assumption, shift temporal distance, or change who is being addressed. A merely decorative break wastes one of the form's strongest tools for development.
- Protect voice from formal compliance. Beginners sometimes introduce archaic diction, unnecessary exclamations, or inverted phrasing solely to secure a rhyme. Test every unusual construction against the speaker's character. If the person would not plausibly say it, find another sonic solution.
- Design the ending from the poem's central image. The last rhyme should not be mistaken for closure by itself. Return to, transform, or newly interpret an earlier detail. A memorable ending completes the reader's emotional understanding while allowing the established sound to provide resonance rather than explanation.
During revision, mark the opening words, the rhyme-bearing words, and the strongest image in different ways. If the sound words draw all the attention while the image remains weak, revise the poem's sensory core. Then read the draft aloud twice: once naturally and once slowly enough to hear every line ending. Remove filler, repair breathless stretches, and soften any rhyme the voice seems to advertise. Finally, ask a reader where the poem turns and what remains after its final sound; the answers reveal whether structure and meaning have become inseparable.
Interesting Facts
- The earliest sound in a line can shape interpretation. When opening words rhyme, readers connect them before the sentences are complete. The relationship may produce agreement, irony, escalation, or contradiction, depending on what follows each initial echo.
- Freedom in line length increases responsibility. Without a single syllabic mold determining pace, the poet must decide where breath, emphasis, and hesitation belong. This flexibility can make a Lento sound natural, but accidental variation becomes especially audible when rhyme is already organizing attention.
- The form can support opposite tones. Conspicuous echoes may create verbal play and comic momentum, yet the same recurrence can feel obsessive, ceremonial, or mournful. Tone depends less on rhyme itself than on diction, rhythm, imagery, and the emotional relationship between repeated sounds.
- Additional rhyme changes the reader's workload. A denser sound pattern can generate delight and momentum, but it also asks the audience to track more correspondences in a short space. Experienced poets balance that pleasure with clear syntax and concrete images.
- The stanza break can outweigh the final rhyme. Readers may remember the moment when the poem changes direction more strongly than any individual sound. A well-placed turn gives the second stanza a reason to exist rather than making it a continuation of the first.
- Several examples teach more than one polished model. As you read the community poems, compare restrained and emphatic uses of sound, direct and surprising turns, and different rhythmic choices. Variation reveals which qualities belong to the form's pressure and which arise from an individual poet's style.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and structure meet most fruitfully when the Lento's recurring sounds do more than decorate an idea. The opening echoes can bind related images, while the stanza division can stage a change in knowledge or feeling. The following themes are literary possibilities rather than claims about which subjects appear most often in the collection.
- Memory and return. Recurrent sounds can imitate the mind circling an event, object, or person. The second stanza may revisit the same memory from a changed emotional distance, allowing repetition to suggest both persistence and revision.
- Conversation and disagreement. The compact architecture suits a statement followed by an answer, correction, or rebuttal. Similar sounds can connect opposing positions, showing how speakers remain entangled even while their meanings diverge.
- Nature in transition. Dawn, weather, migration, seasonal change, and shifting light provide visible movement that can cross the stanza break. Sonic recurrence lends continuity while the imagery records transformation.
- Humor and wordplay. Prominent opening echoes can set up comic anticipation, and a strategically delayed rhyme can deliver a punch or reversal. The challenge is to preserve a coherent situation so that ingenuity supports the joke instead of replacing it.
- Longing, separation, and reunion. Answering sounds can suggest distance bridged by memory or desire. One stanza may establish absence, while the next complicates whether connection is restored, imagined, refused, or lost.
- Choice and consequence. The form's divided movement can place an action beside its result. Repeated sound then becomes a subtle reminder that the consequence grows from the choice, even when the tone or imagery changes sharply.
- Portraits and tributes. A short sequence of focused details can reveal character without extensive biography. Carefully chosen line openings may name qualities, gestures, or moments, while the final stanza turns description toward personal significance.
Browse the poems in this collection with these possibilities in mind, but look for approaches that resist such categories as well. Two poets may address the same subject yet create entirely different experiences through pacing, diction, stanza turns, and the prominence they give to rhyme.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a Lento lies between audible design and credible utterance. Its sound pattern wants to be noticed, especially at the highly exposed beginnings of lines, yet a poem becomes memorable only when those echoes seem inseparable from what is being seen, felt, argued, or remembered. Technical recognizability is therefore only a threshold. The deeper achievement is to make the reader feel that this particular subject required these returns of sound and this compact division of thought.
Strong examples create relationships among structure, syntax, and emotional movement. An opening-word rhyme may link images that initially seem unrelated, then reveal a hidden association. An answering end sound may provide reassurance in one poem and entrapment in another. The stanza break can transform the pattern by changing the speaker's knowledge, direction of address, or attitude. Editors and attentive readers notice when these elements reinforce one another: a hesitant rhythm serving uncertainty, crowded music serving excitement, or a suddenly plain line cutting through verbal play.
Weaker drafts often treat each formal demand as an isolated box to check. Predictable rhyme words announce themselves too early; forced inversions make the speaker sound unlike a living person; repeated openings perform the same grammatical task until the sequence becomes mechanical. Another common problem is over-explanation. Because the structure is brief, a poet may fear that the turn will be missed and state its meaning directly, leaving no interpretive space. The opposite failure is insufficient development: two stanzas present the same idea in nearly the same terms, so the pause separates units without creating movement. Both problems can be addressed by strengthening the image system and asking what genuinely changes.
Individuality remains visible through the degree of sonic display, the texture of the lines, the chosen scale of the subject, and the handling of closure. One poet may make the pattern nearly conversational; another may foreground its artifice for ceremony or wit. Neither approach is inherently stronger. Quality depends on whether the choice establishes a coherent reading experience. Comparing multiple community poems is especially useful here because it trains the ear to distinguish convention from inevitability. After several examples, readers begin to hear when a rhyme opens meaning rather than merely completing a pattern, when a stanza turn deepens the poem, and when the poet's voice remains unmistakable inside shared constraints.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and let several community poems revise your sense of what a Lento can accomplish. Compare how different writers handle opening echoes, rhythmic freedom, stanza turns, and the final release of sound. When a poem interests you, leave a thoughtful comment about a specific image, tonal shift, or sonic choice and how it shaped your reading.
Then try composing your own. Choose a small but consequential moment, test its language aloud, and publish the result on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can become part of the continuing conversation among poems that share a form without surrendering an individual voice.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 11 Lento poems, providing multiple interpretations to read beside one another. The selection offers opportunities to compare how poets manage opening sound, end-rhyme, rhythm, stanza movement, and closure within the same formal framework. Some writers may follow the conventions closely, while others may adapt or challenge aspects of them. Reading across the collection helps show how shared constraints can lead to distinct voices and artistic decisions.
Lento Categories
Definition | What is Lento 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.