The mountains rumble the trees
sway the sky calls my name the
sun gleams brighter while flowers
blood in the mere essence of me
the calm waters pour in leaving
soft sand between my toes when
we move the galaxy takes a bow as
stars race across the darkness
why when we move life happens
dancing on our feet the earth
spins around just to meet and
greet us beyond this wondrous
place shaping our very existence
why when we simply move in sync
My dad was born 1942
my mom 1943 together
they created me I am
beautifully made Joy
emphasised happy
Anniversary Honey
Craving sensual thoughts
hidden melodies created
mastered performed through
necessity I’ve become to
explore the nature of you
the way god made you just
for me how you balance the
arch in my back the nape
of my neck man you are Mann
created by god to respond to
my beckon call reaching deep
into the mild mannerism of my
mind as I want to lead an yet
you are man I am woman my
every movement controlled
by god’s thoughts of me the
purity of my desire completely
designed for man in gods own
image I am yours take me
according to your will as I am
creation holiness within mankind
shared solely with the Holy Spirit
my heart sings the desires of man
Dare I Say
who is coming
to dinner who
is now being
seated at the
table of plenty
in this immediate
bluster of chaotic
bliss sitting across
from me is he
supping from the
brass cup sharing
his blood blessings
kneeling before
mother Mary
while Magdelene
washes my feet
I cater to the words
of Solomon the
quiet calm of
Abraham mingling
solely with Isaac
dare I Say
for we are not
Gypsies bathed
within the
Glory of God
Written by Yolanda Nicholsen
6-19-2-24 4:23 am 1:23 poetry soup time
Who believe to be alive,
on this earth after death.
Who crave fame, Rial or crown,
hard to be a savior of mankind.
Decisive fatwa from best findings,
Grand Ayatollah blackclothed.
Mourning in the morning,
a lot of verses are amusing.
Hollywood’s Lucille Ball, loved by many,
had an enormously profound effect on me.
She was funny and kind and goofy,
and so wonderful, she lit up my 1960’s TV.
My favorite show of hundreds of thousands
is of her and Ethel making candy.
Until Carol Burnett came along, I thought a funnier
woman could never be.
This gorgeous entertainer will probably never
know the enormous effect she has on me still today.
Many an evening I laugh until I cry at her
funny antics on my TV, I love to watch her play.
he was father and son
all in one
no doudt
he was sold out
it was for few dime
as they drank wine
one was unkind
that was a time
the little boy was born
the world was torn
he came in at dust
it became christmas
that
HISTORY OF JESUS
(true feelings none fiction)
Dear Godfather Ernest Pinckerly.
The day you died when I was young was horrible.
My life had changed ever since. The memory of you is like a blur all I remember is your name and being with you from that short moment.
My father came to visit. Before I knew tears and cries of your death happened. Your beautiful white home came to it's silence. My tricycle and playground I left behind and more ,to go live with my older sister I found out about in last minute.
Till this day my life haven't been the same, went through so much since after your death.
My father doesn't speak of you.but I never bother to asked for observing the situation already gave me my answer.
I write this letter to you to release these memories. To let you know I always miss you.
emotional
understudy
positioning
it's self
upon the
stage of
life as
prop to
be used
as a
replacement
for the
injured true
internal self
When my heart is crushed between two rocks,
I struggle to find you in the darkness.
Build of temptation
foundation of moral
a layer of guilt.
To lead me in this world of **** twisted hearts.
Take mine out to see if you were hiding you there.
Building on temptation
flowing though lust
killing myself knowing all that I have lost.
To take my heart to free my soul because I always knew I would be buried alone.
Panda and Combine
We both are generally lazy
Until it comes time to work
Then we both eat crops
We both are losing land to live on.
We both start small then eventually grow
While one prefers the west.
While the other prefers the east.
Dedicated to my Dad Jerry W. Niday 3/20/1952 - 6/18/2013
I am who I am because of him
He’s the reason for my son’s name
He gave me my courage & my strength
To stand tall even when standing wasn’t easy
Stand for the ones who can’t
To think and fend for myself
I’m my Daddy made over
Taught me to fight back
To never back down
How to pick myself back up
When I’ve been knocked down
Fight for what I believe
I’m my Daddy made over
He gave me my stubbornness
Gave me my pride
Gave me my temper
Taught me not to take crap
To speak my mind to no matter who
Work for what I want
I’m my Daddy made over
How to keep my emotions in check
How to handle large amounts of pain
When in trouble he always had my back
He knew how my mind worked better than anyone
I got it from him
I’m my Daddy made over
Even though he’s gone
I’ll stand and continue on
I may stumble I may fall
May even get hurt along the way
But I’ll pick myself back up
I’ll dust myself off and stand tall
I’m honored and proud to say
I’m my Daddy made over
Introduction
Grief in a marsiya must do more than announce an absence: it must make remembrance audible, sustained, and worthy of shared attention. That demand creates a powerful reading experience. The speaker may mourn, praise, narrate, bear witness, or move among all these impulses, so the emotional force comes not only from sorrow but from the manner in which sorrow is enlarged into memory.
As you browse the community poems, look for differences in scale and address. One poet may speak intimately to the departed, while another may adopt a ceremonial voice directed toward a gathered audience. Some writers may engage the sacred memory of Karbala; others may interpret the broader elegiac possibilities of the form through personal or communal loss. Narrative scenes, repeated invocations, vivid objects, meditations on sacrifice, and restrained moments of silence can all lead the reader toward mourning by different routes.
Reading several marsiyas side by side reveals how much depends on proportion. How long does a poet remain with praise before turning toward loss? Does the poem recreate a life through action, or concentrate on the vacancy left behind? Does patterned sound intensify feeling, or deliberately yield to a quieter cadence? One isolated example may suggest that its choices are inevitable. A collection shows that they are decisions. By comparing how different writers balance public tribute with private pain, readers can better appreciate both the form's inherited gravity and the individual imagination working within it.
Reading Guide
Read a marsiya as an unfolding act of remembrance rather than as a single statement of grief. Its emotional meaning often develops through accumulation: praise gains weight from narrative, narrative sharpens the loss, and lament changes the significance of what came before. Because the poem may carry both intimate feeling and ceremonial force, attend to whom the speaker addresses, how the voice might sound aloud, and where the poem asks an audience to pause. As you read the community poems, compare not simply what each poet mourns, but how each poem leads you into mourning.
- Speaker and audience: Notice whether the voice addresses the departed, witnesses, a faith community, future generations, or the speaker's own heart. The chosen audience determines whether grief feels private, collective, devotional, or commemorative. Ask: who is expected to hear and answer this lament?
- Emotional progression: Trace the movement among praise, scene, conflict, loss, and reflection. A marsiya can gain power by delaying direct lament until the reader understands what has been lost. When comparing poems, ask where sorrow first becomes irreversible.
- Narrative scale: Look for actions, settings, gestures, and consequences rather than only declarations of virtue. Narrative can give elegiac praise a lived body and can expand remembrance toward epic significance. Ask: which scene carries the poem's moral and emotional center?
- Stanzaic momentum: Notice how each recurring unit gathers detail and how its close releases, concentrates, or redirects emotion. Pattern can produce expectancy, making departures from that expectancy especially expressive. Ask: does each stanza advance the remembrance, or merely restate it?
- Sound in recitation: Read selected passages aloud and listen for invocations, repeated names, vowel music, emphatic endings, and deliberate pauses. Marsiya sound is not ornamental when it helps grief become communal speech. Ask: where does the voice naturally rise, break, slow, or fall silent?
- Image and moral specificity: Attend to physical objects, landscapes, bodily details, and signs of absence. Concrete images prevent sacrifice, courage, and sorrow from remaining abstract. Ask: which image could belong only to this particular loss, and how does it alter the poem's praise?
Read beyond the first example, then return to it. Comparison makes visible the choices that initially seem transparent, especially choices of address, pacing, narrative emphasis, and closure.
Writing Tips
Begin a marsiya draft by identifying what must be preserved, not merely what must be mourned. The strongest material contains a relationship, action, value, or witnessed moment that can sustain more than generalized sadness. Before settling formal details, write down the scenes, names, objects, conflicts, and acts of courage that make the loss particular. The form's gravity should arise from these particulars rather than being applied afterward as a ceremonial tone.
- Choose material with an ethical center. Ask what the remembered person, sacrifice, or event requires the living to understand. Material suited to marsiya often joins grief to witness: the poem does not only miss someone but also preserves the meaning of a life or death. Avoid selecting a subject merely because it seems solemn.
- Decide the scope of remembrance. A personal loss may be approached through one room, one gesture, or one surviving object; a sacred or communal subject may require a wider narrative field. Establish what the poem can responsibly contain. Excessive scope can turn lament into summary, while insufficient development can make elevated language feel unsupported.
- Build an emotional sequence. Plan movements rather than a catalogue of virtues. You might proceed from invocation to scene, from scene to praise, and from praise to the recognition of absence. Another poem may begin after the loss and recover the past gradually. Each section should change the reader's understanding.
- Let praise emerge through evidence. Repeated adjectives such as brave, noble, or beloved can flatten the person being honored. Show a decision, a risk, a kindness, or a moment of endurance. Specific action makes eulogy credible and gives grief something tangible to lose.
- Use pattern as emotional pressure. Formal recurrence can resemble returning waves of memory, but compliance alone does not create necessity. Draft key sentences in natural speech before shaping them. If rhyme or stanza closure distorts meaning, revise the syntax, image, or line rather than inserting decorative filler.
- Balance ceremony with human vulnerability. A public voice can carry dignity, while a sudden intimate address can reveal the wound beneath it. Choose shifts deliberately. Constant grandeur risks emotional distance; uninterrupted confession may lose the communal or commemorative reach associated with the form.
- Compose for the ear. Test repeated sounds, invocations, and names at speaking volume. Dense sonic patterning can intensify ritual attention, but too many emphatic endings may make every moment sound equally important. Vary sentence length and place quieter phrases where the listener needs space to absorb an image.
- Earn the ending. Avoid closing with a generic claim that the departed will never be forgotten. Return instead to a transformed image, an unfinished duty, a communal response, or a final address whose meaning has deepened. The ending may console, protest, pray, or remain unresolved, but it should answer the poem's emotional journey.
During revision, mark every abstract statement of sorrow or praise and ask whether a scene, sound, or object can carry part of its burden. Read the entire draft aloud to test breath, pacing, and the force of stanza endings. Then invite a reader to identify where attention intensifies and where it drifts. Revise mechanical patterning, over-explanation, and unearned grandeur until structure and remembrance seem inseparable.
Interesting Facts
- Elegy and narrative can pull in opposite directions. Lament wants to dwell on absence, while narrative moves through actions and consequences. A compelling marsiya uses that tension productively: events keep the poem advancing, but grief changes the emotional weight of every remembered event.
- Praise becomes stronger when it includes vulnerability. Unbroken heroization may create distance. A gesture of tenderness, fatigue, uncertainty, or human attachment can make courage more affecting because the reader understands what sacrifice cost rather than encountering virtue only as an ideal.
- Recurring stanza shapes influence memory. When the ear learns to expect a pattern, each return can feel like renewed testimony. The same recurrence may sound ceremonial, urgent, meditative, or inexorable depending on sentence movement and where the poet places narrative revelation.
- Recitation can expose craft hidden on the page. A line that appears ornate may become clear when voiced, while a visually smooth passage may prove difficult to breathe. Pauses, repeated names, and emphatic closures help determine whether mourning feels spoken to a community or confined to private reflection.
- Time can operate on several levels at once. The poem may inhabit the moment before death, the moment of loss, the speaker's later remembrance, and the audience's continuing responsibility. Skillful transitions among these times enlarge grief without requiring constant explanation.
- Variation does not automatically erase identity. Poets may adapt length, diction, stanza handling, or degree of narrative emphasis while retaining the form's central work of lament, praise, and witness. Browsing the poems in this collection helps readers distinguish purposeful adaptation from a pattern that has become merely decorative.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form meet most powerfully when grief has something larger to reveal: a moral choice, a communal memory, a broken bond, or a duty inherited by survivors. The following are literary possibilities rather than statistical rankings, and each can support markedly different approaches to voice, narrative, and ceremony.
- Karbala and devotional remembrance: Sacred memory can unite lament with testimony, courage, loyalty, and sacrifice. The challenge is to make reverence active through carefully chosen scenes and images rather than relying only on inherited solemnity.
- Personal bereavement: The death of a relative, friend, mentor, or beloved person can bring ceremonial scale into contact with intimate detail. Domestic objects, remembered speech, and habits of care allow public tribute to remain recognizably human.
- Courage under pressure: A decisive act can provide the narrative spine that sustained lament needs. By showing fear, consequence, and choice, the poet can praise bravery without reducing the remembered figure to a flawless emblem.
- Sacrifice and moral responsibility: Loss may compel the living to ask what must now be defended, continued, or changed. This theme suits a form in which mourning can become witness and remembrance can carry an ethical demand beyond the poem.
- Communal loss: The death of a leader, protector, teacher, or representative figure may affect an entire group. Shifts between I and we can dramatize how individual sorrow enters collective memory without pretending that everyone grieves identically.
- Absence embodied in objects: An empty place, garment, threshold, letter, or familiar tool can concentrate grief more effectively than repeated declarations. Returning to such an image across the poem lets meaning accumulate and gives the ending a possible point of return.
- Inheritance and continuity: Mourning often raises questions about what survives in language, practice, faith, family, or duty. The poem can move from recollection toward responsibility, allowing closure to acknowledge pain without forcing easy consolation.
As you read the community poems, compare how writers transform related subjects through different speakers, scenes, sonic textures, and endings. Similar themes need not produce similar marsiyas; the revealing difference lies in what each poet chooses to preserve and ask of the reader.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a marsiya lies between the singularity of grief and the public work of commemoration. A death may be intimately felt, yet the poem often seeks a voice spacious enough to honor character, recount action, preserve memory, and address listeners beyond the self. Memorable examples do not resolve this tension by choosing either private sorrow or ceremonial dignity. They allow each to test the other. Formal elevation gives personal pain resonance, while a precise human detail prevents ceremony from becoming remote.
Structure feels necessary when it follows the mind's changing relation to loss. Recurrence can suggest grief returning, but each return should carry altered knowledge. Narrative expansion can establish the scale of a life or sacrifice, but every episode must deepen the elegiac purpose rather than function as background information. Stanza endings, repeated sounds, invocations, and shifts of address matter most when they control emotional pressure: they can postpone recognition, gather witnesses, intensify praise, or create a silence that the next passage must answer. Editors notice when these devices appear to arise from the subject's demands rather than from an obligation to display technique.
Weak drafts commonly substitute predictable solemnity for development. Mechanical patterning may make separate stanzas feel interchangeable; forced language may sacrifice clarity to sound; repeated praise may tell readers what to admire without showing why; over-explanation may leave no space for grief to reverberate. Another danger is disproportion. A long account can lose its emotional center, while a compressed lament may claim epic or communal significance that its images have not earned. Revision should therefore test causality as well as beauty: does each scene alter the lament, and does each formal return deepen what the audience understands?
Individuality remains visible through selection and angle. One poet may center a witness who survives; another may address the departed directly; another may organize remembrance around a place, an object, a decision, or an unanswered question. Diction may be devotional, conversational, restrained, or highly ceremonial, provided the voice is coherent with the poem's act of mourning. Comparing multiple community poems develops judgment because it separates shared conventions from artistic inevitability. Readers begin to hear which patterns create genuine expectancy, which details convert praise into presence, and which endings leave remembrance active after the final line.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before deciding what a marsiya can sound like. Compare how each writer balances lament, praise, narrative, devotion, and intimate memory, and notice where a particular image or turn of address remains with you. Thoughtful comments can name those choices: describe where the poem's emotional pressure deepened, which scene clarified the loss, or how the ending changed your understanding.
Then try shaping your own act of remembrance. Write toward what deserves to be witnessed and preserved, revise it for the speaking voice, and publish your marsiya on PoetrySoup so other readers can encounter and discuss your interpretation.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 4 Marsiya poems, offering multiple interpretations to read closely and compare. Within a collection of this size, differences in voice, subject, narrative scope, sound, and emotional movement can become especially visible. Individual poets may follow established conventions, adapt them to personal or communal remembrance, or challenge expectations while preserving the form's elegiac purpose. Read each poem on its own terms, then consider what the contrasts reveal.
Marsiya Categories
Definition | What is Marsiya 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.
arabic, death, eulogy, fard, ghazal, hamd, hazal, hijv, loss, madah, manqabat, marsiya, masnavi, mourning, munaajaat, musaddas, naat, nazm, qasida, qataa, rubaiyat, rubayi, salaam, seharaa, urdu, vaasokht