The middle eastern spell that shames the solemn
In shadowed midden dwells the stain now common
In darkness beaten fell in name of goodwill
Our princess peace repels their pain and blood spill
She struggles selfless held in chains by order
Poor passive tranquil, gelled by blames and borders
The stolen fertile meld of reigns now taken
Where powered egos tell of hope forsaken
Let gentle logic down the dames of warfare
Whose metal madness grounds the games to threadbare
Pray mistral mildness pound and maim their story
'Til peaceful light surrounds regaining glory
"Seed", poem about love and family, for my girlfriend Kim ??
------
When darkness falls, your spirit is my light,
My world is ordered, banished is the night.
To see your smile is to inhale the spring,
The deepest solace that your presence brings.
My dearest Kim, the future we embrace,
No path is feared when walking at your pace.
For you possess a beauty soft and keen,
The heart's true compass, the most precious scene.
We speak of days where two will soon be three,
A promise whispered, meant for you and me.
A little life that soon will find its start,
The living proof that love is in the heart.
My love for you, a river strong and vast,
The quiet dream that is forever cast.
Part Thirty — The Story's End
Sweet Giti, gem in heaven's ring,
Stayed true in love through everything.
Her heart she gave to her dear flame,
Soul's companion, love's sweet name.
And Saeed—behold his blessed state!
Though challenged by his cruel fate,
Hear how his trials came to bear
His faithful heart, worn down by care.
Despite the wounds and aching soul,
From strangers' scorn and kin's control,
Praise be! The face of peace he found,
His shirt of sorrow torn and drowned.
He bound his heart to lover's hair,
Escaped the world's cold, harsh despair.
In joy they lived, in laughter bright,
Their sacred vows, their hearts alight.
Two bodies but one soul complete,
In love's sweet street they found their beat.
No more "Giti" or "Saeed" to name,
Just Wine and Cup, one heart, one flame.
____________________________________
Thus ends the tale of love's sweet art,
Where two souls joined to make one heart.
Far from the homeland, when lips part to speak,
This Persian candy works wonders, magic unique.
The spell of Rumi’s verse, of Hafez’ deep art,
In distant lands, it uplifts every heart.
A potion of love rides this caravan’s crest—
Saadi himself boasts of its charm manifest.
Open your eyes, and at this threshold stay—
The Masnavi begins to tell your tale today.
Yes, the key to the treasure of bliss is our tongue—
Rumi unlocks his vault where legends are sung.
The world is our homeland, in this unmatched place—
Our Persian speech bestows us with grace.
Though caged in a corner where gallows still loom,
Beware — for it sails on a wave of dark gloom.
A wave from the sea of existence runs red,
A net cast through nightfall and daylight ahead.
You, sovereign hawk in this narrow domain —
Be not content, for these bars still remain.
Yet I bring good news from the breath of the Divine:
Safe shores await, where escape is still mine.
Step once beyond this cocoon of despair —
And hundreds of cages dissolve in the air.
The Master of Being, who raised “Malek” from none,
Now stands in this riddle — where all is undone.
Doubt not — you were sent to remain and embrace,
The cosmos is bursting with kisses and grace.
We live — but not on level ground,
We are sunlight clinging to the edge of a crumbling wall.
I remembered Grandmother’s voice,
She warned me once: “Boy, beware the fall.”
We leap —
and soon enough
this house of days
will crash upon us all.
We were mountains once —
and still we held,
Like millstones
bearing every crushing call.
In a blink, the starling flew —
and from the highlands, they all withdraw.
I suffer the market’s ache today,
Where souls are sold and bent to law.
She asked me,
“What are you doing here?”
“Growing fat in a pasture
meant for slaughter.”
Knives are sharpened, lambs grow sleek —
In the end,
the knife writes every fate.
Traps and snares on every path —
from the tavern’s door to the lover’s gate.
And when the final cup is drained,
They march us up
the gallows straight.
But look —
again, our morning reign begins!
The sun breaks through the long black night.
Grief has closed its weary eyes —
I’ve carried so much pain
to reach this light.
And now, today, the “King” is smiling,
Joyful in his lover’s gaze —
They meet beneath the sky
in a world remade
by morning’s blaze.
The beginning of me the ideology
wearing wires pregnant buying
weapons and drugs from corrupt
officers for the federal bureau
of investigation the department
of Justice the center piece
cointelpro levied just so the
matter of facts the 44 magnum
in my mouth teeth chattering
looking through an assault rifle
red dot on the female agents
ponytail my children singing
my girl with the fbi supervisor
I'd be murdered for a lessor
god I'd be assassinated bullied
extorted crippled by a car bomb
I will still drink my lemonade
on a Sunday afternoon I'd still
die an American hearing my
fetus heartbeat I'd still remember
Chicago I will never fret over
gang violence nor corruption
I shall still adore my roses eating
ice quenching my thirst during
a stroke I'll still be American in
this land on this soil my blood
shall run through the hidden
canals as the sun shine on my
back an yet I'll still be American
I'll still be me when I diiiiie
Divided under the cities
streams mapping decisive
endings while toiling about
the beginning boldness
reaching for braising
characters galloping
amidst a certain angst
we’ve devoured nothingness
and opened the sky
with truth thrashing
tempers meaningful tools
craving an emptiness
above the continuous
Bayshore a quiet offering
pelicans landings sinking
yet surrounding the
jaded light house that
withered to soon exposing
only the dim lantern leaning
to one side still brightening
the rippling waves
Written by Yolanda Nicholsen
April 7th 2014
getting injections
for traumatic brain injury
Unafraid of hits on my life by
the mafia Ciro Gargano arson
murderer it's been a hit on my
life since Christmas eve 1984
tailor shop murders inc. go
ahead Ciro hit me again how
about another assassination
attempt or go all the way out
with another bomb in my face
now that was very effective right
traumatic brain injury just so you
and Jamaican jay townsend
Johnson Henry could extort
my american poetry murder me
for witnessing the plotting
of arson murder of 9 people
hit me Ciro Gargano go ahead
and hit me again I will never
ever fear organized crime
corruption abuse of power
bullying intimidating me in
American
Standing there wearing
Baileys holding a Glass
of Cognac I notice your
time piece Kremlin findings
as you calmly approached
my shyness I recognised
the untimely gesture leaving
my quarters knowing full
well beruit was near you
offered yourself with no
strings an yet bombs sounded
throughout the night time
air I was taken an yet
startled King we were taken
to stone slabs draped with
teal fabric peppermint oils
garments of silk I wore you
into the night while we
cringed with fright the town
emptied the tower tumbled
I kelp yours smile in view
as your body crumbled into
the rumble of yesterday I
awakened to the sound of
the sun rising in the east
as I returned to blood
soaked carnage absent
from heaven remembering
only your touch your warmth
your illuminated essence burning
my soul whispering dasvidanyia
from Russia with love
Being fed when corrupt
agents gather junk sick
fentanyl addicts functioning
only by giving false confusion
in exchange for a cup of
coffee at Denny’s bus tickets
from Alabama to Nashville
to Chicago where informants
are being tossed in front of
moving cars faceless
unrecognisable finally the
ultimate what’s in the box
it’s a human skull on a sidewalk
trick of treat jay Townsend
Johnson Henry swooning
Special agent Paula Brand
where does it all end increase
in fentanyl overdoses deaths
in Chicago being FED rat poison
Suffocating fear envy and denial
stop exploiting mentally Ill fentanyl
addicts homeless hoarders in Chicago
Have a happy Halloween check all
your candy for fentanyl
Complete rapture as hurricane
Milton impose upon the the
animals while storks fish for
dinner florida ducks cling to
drift wood as a tiny baby
alligators scurries across
the waters edge the lake is
swollen capturing our home
this time we are actually on
the lake our neighbors have
become first responders why
we've survived more hurricanes
as I sat writing my poem warmth
the promise of hurricane Charlie
announced to destroy our home
an yet we survived arriving in a
new townhome on riverside drive
as I hurried to summit my poem
listening watching the land cry
today we survived Milton and was
he bitter angry enraged waters
rising above us over twenty feet
of rain surge no where to go I
watch the birds doing the same
thing they did just before the store
resilience how they manage feed
their young no worries trusting in
nature knowing that no matter
how dark how much flooding rain
lightening we will indeed survive
the storm in this house on the lake
The broad banks shifting
the stone slabs across
the deserted plains of
Arlington white tombstone
lined nestled beneath
decorated wreaths calling
upon sudden hint of braising
sunshine gleaming over falling
leaves catering to yesterday
reaching for tomorrow and
yet silence abode the marble
timings while old glory
flickered between the calm
breeze hints of sadness falls
by the way side while tears
stain the workers cheeks
so we’ll crafted mastered
beyond masonry moments
The vastness of it all mi
ancestors the shores of
pastel climbing beneath
my feet essence of Veneto
the wildness of black cherries
bluntness of plums strings
of grapes opened just so
found behind a glass of
Merlot singing lemoncello
crowding tastes buds through
rows of lemon trees crawling
olive branches sweeping the
stone ways a covenant of mi
Nonna dancing throughout
Rome mi ancestors Mason
Veneto builders an yet
cemeteries where religious
statues buildings tombstones
are crafted by the blood
of my ancestors hands
all over Italy the vastness
of it all remembering
mi Nonna remembering Rome
Unafraid of my stalker Jay Townsend Johnson Henry Jamaican Tampa native data breach cyber attack identity fraud truly sad she was born 1972 clearly obsessed with my identity my prayers are with this stalker arrived with a gunman to end my life 8-14-2003 attempted to impersonate me and extort my American poetry I’m sending prayers because arson murderer Ciro Gargano hired this stalker to obstruct justice in the arson murders of 9 people because I wore wires pregnant for the Fbi they then ignited a car bomb in my face to destroy my brain to allow her to become me after death that failed cause I survived the car bomb Ciro Gargano his brother Peter decided to embezzle my traumatic brain injury claim to pay this imposter off that failed she went crazed crazy obsessed fatal attraction dangerous she believed she was actually me this is very traumatic and scary I feel unsettling but I must be brave stop identity fraud equivalent to ISIS terrorist cyber attacks on government offices truly horrid staying in my faith god bless America
Introduction
The particular pleasure of reading a masnavi lies in its double motion: a pair of lines can arrive with satisfying sonic completion while the larger meditation, romance, or spiritual journey continues to unfold. That tension gives readers something immediate to enjoy and something larger to pursue. Each local resolution may offer an image, insight, exchange, or turning point, yet its full significance often appears only after later passages deepen or complicate it.
As you read the community poems, you may encounter intimate prayers, symbolic love stories, dramatic conversations, moral reflections, dreamlike encounters, or narrative journeys. One poet may speak with devotional certainty; another may make doubt the engine of the poem. Some approaches may emphasize storytelling, while others move through linked perceptions or teachings. The recurring sound pattern can feel ceremonial, urgent, tender, incantatory, or even troubled, depending on the diction and pace surrounding it.
Browsing multiple masnavis reveals choices that a single example cannot: how much independence a couplet can carry, how a poet moves between earthly and sacred love, and how instruction can remain dramatic rather than merely declarative. Compare several poets' approaches to transitions, symbolic images, speakers, and endings. Not every poem will interpret the conventions identically, and that variation is part of the collection's value. Reading beyond the first example helps distinguish the form's recognizable resources from the individual imagination using them.
Reading Guide
Read a masnavi on two scales at once. First, listen to the immediate satisfaction created within each paired unit; then follow the emotional, narrative, or contemplative thread crossing from one pair to the next. The most revealing comparisons concern not only whether a pattern is present, but what that pattern accomplishes. As you browse the poems in this collection, notice when sound intensifies meaning, when an apparent lesson emerges through experience, and when love language keeps both human and spiritual possibilities alive.
- Local closure and continuing movement: Notice whether each couplet behaves like a self-contained chamber or like a doorway into the next moment. This balance controls momentum. Ask: does the poet create satisfying pauses without allowing the larger journey to become a string of disconnected sayings?
- The weight of end words: Paired rhyme places unusual pressure on the words that complete the lines. Strong end words can sharpen an image or revelation; predictable ones can make thought feel predetermined. Ask: are the rhymes serving the speaker's discovery, or does the thought seem arranged merely to reach them?
- Pulse, breath, and ceremony: A sustained rhythmic current can give prayer, narrative, or counsel an incantatory authority. Listen for places where the pace quickens, settles, or strains. Ask: how does the poet's pulse affect the difference between a private confession and a public teaching?
- Speaker and addressee: Determine who is speaking and who is being addressed: a beloved, God, the self, a guide, an absent listener, or several of these at once. Ask: does the identity of the listener remain stable, or does a shift in address deepen the poem's ambiguity?
- Literal and symbolic imagery: Gardens, roads, doors, light, thirst, wine, birds, or weather may function as physical details and as inward signs. Ask: can the image live sensuously before it is interpreted, or is its meaning explained before readers can experience it?
- Teaching through drama: Didactic purpose becomes more compelling when an insight is tested by conflict, choice, loss, or dialogue. Ask: does the poem enact its wisdom, or simply announce conclusions that the reader has not been allowed to earn?
- The final transformation: Because earlier units repeatedly offer small closures, the ending needs more than another neat rhyme. Ask whether the last passage changes the meaning of the journey, gathers its symbols, opens a mystery, or delivers only a summary.
Compare several community poems with these questions in mind. Differences in pacing, address, imagery, and closure will show how widely poets can interpret the same inherited framework.
Writing Tips
Begin a masnavi draft by identifying both an outward movement and an inward need. The outward movement might be a journey, meeting, argument, memory, search, or sequence of visions; the inward need might involve love, surrender, doubt, knowledge, forgiveness, or union. This pairing gives the poem somewhere to go while preventing its spiritual or romantic dimension from becoming a collection of unsupported abstractions.
- Choose material capable of development: A single observation may produce an elegant couplet but not a sustained poem. Select a situation that can pass through stages: longing, resistance, encounter, reversal, and changed understanding. The sequence need not be a conventional plot, but it should accumulate consequence.
- Sketch the poem's spine before perfecting sound: Write a brief account of what the speaker experiences and learns. Mark where the central question changes. This protects the draft from a common beginner mistake: allowing available rhymes to dictate a chain of unrelated statements.
- Give each couplet a task: One pair might establish a scene, another challenge the speaker, another enlarge a symbol, and another revise an earlier belief. Local completeness is valuable, but every unit should also contribute pressure to the whole. Remove couplets that merely repeat an insight in different words.
- Delay rhyme when necessary: Draft the clearest and most vivid version of the thought first, then search for sound relationships that preserve it. Obvious inversions, filler phrases, and vague end words advertise formal compliance at the expense of voice. A rhyme should feel discovered inside the meaning, not attached after it.
- Use rhythm to distinguish emotional states: A steady current can support invocation or teaching, while firmer stresses may carry confrontation and gentler phrasing may suggest surrender. Read aloud to hear padding, cramped syntax, and unintended sing-song effects. Do not sacrifice a living sentence merely to make the count appear tidy.
- Build a coherent image system: Choose a few physical motifs that can change as the poem progresses. A closed door might become a threshold; thirst might become fear of the offered cup. Transforming images can communicate mystical development more powerfully than repeatedly naming enlightenment, love, or faith.
- Let instruction emerge from stakes: If the poem offers counsel, give the speaker something to lose by accepting it. Dialogue, hesitation, error, and self-contradiction make wisdom dramatic. Avoid explaining every symbol or ending each couplet with a maxim, which can flatten mystery into sermonizing.
- Design an ending rather than stopping: The conclusion may resolve a quest, alter the beloved's identity, return to an opening image, or leave the speaker at a more demanding question. Because the poem has supplied many small sonic completions, the final couplet needs conceptual or emotional resonance beyond neatness.
During revision, read the entire draft aloud once for narrative continuity and again while pausing after every couplet. The first reading reveals stalled movement; the second exposes weak local units. Circle forced end words, abstract claims without images, shifts in address, and rhythmic roughness. Then ask a reader where the poem's spiritual or romantic stakes became clearest and where anticipation faded. Revise toward necessity: sound, pacing, image, and insight should appear to arise from the same unfolding experience.
Interesting Facts
- Repeated closure can increase suspense: Although each couplet offers a degree of sonic completion, the thought need not be complete. A poet can end one unit with a question, warning, or withheld explanation, making the next self-contained pair feel both new and urgently connected.
- Renewed rhyme supports expansion: The ability to establish fresh sound relationships across successive units prevents one terminal sound from controlling an extended narrative. This freedom is not effortless: every new pairing must still sound natural, memorable, and appropriate to the moment.
- A couplet can change meaning retrospectively: A statement that first sounds like romantic devotion may later acquire sacred, ironic, or cautionary force. Readers often remember the compact unit, but its place in the sequence determines what that unit finally means.
- The beloved can remain productively unstable: Human and divine address may overlap without being reduced to a puzzle with one answer. Experienced poets can sustain that uncertainty through pronouns, images, and shifts of tone, allowing longing to operate simultaneously on several levels.
- Didactic writing does not require a lecturer: A lesson can be embodied in a failed choice, a guide's riddle, an argument between voices, or the transformation of a recurring image. Indirect teaching often gives readers more interpretive responsibility and therefore greater emotional investment.
- Length changes the form's emotional scale: A brief masnavi may feel like a concentrated encounter, while an extended one can make repetition, delay, and return part of the spiritual experience. As you read the community poems, compare what each poet gains or risks by the chosen degree of expansion.
Popular Themes
Subject and form interact especially closely in a masnavi because recurring local resolutions can accompany a much longer process of seeking, resistance, recognition, or change. The following themes are literary possibilities rather than statistical rankings. Each can benefit from the contrast between compact couplets and an accumulating emotional or narrative arc.
- Spiritual seeking: A speaker's movement from certainty into doubt, or from estrangement toward attention, gives successive couplets distinct stages to explore. The form can make each insight feel momentarily complete while the deeper search remains unfinished.
- Human and divine love: The language of desire can address an earthly beloved, a sacred presence, or both. Shifts in imagery and address allow the poem to preserve ambiguity, so that affection becomes a method of spiritual questioning rather than a fixed category.
- Journey and return: Roads, thresholds, exile, pilgrimage, and homecoming suit a sequence that advances through linked episodes. Physical travel can provide concrete momentum while changes in the traveler reveal the inward significance of distance.
- Teacher and seeker: Dialogue between a guide and a questioning voice turns didactic content into drama. Each exchange can correct, complicate, or overturn the previous answer, preventing instruction from becoming a static list of principles.
- Loss, absence, and reunion: Repeated closures can intensify absence because sound resolves while desire does not. A poet can use recurring images or unanswered addresses to make longing accumulate until reunion, acceptance, or a transformed understanding becomes possible.
- Ethical testing: Pride, generosity, loyalty, forgiveness, and responsibility become vivid when placed inside choices rather than stated as virtues. Narrative progression lets readers witness the cost of error and the difficulty of applying an apparently simple lesson.
- Dream, vision, and revelation: Encounters with voices, signs, altered landscapes, or symbolic figures can move naturally between episode and interpretation. The challenge is to retain sensory force, allowing revelation to surprise the speaker instead of merely confirming a predetermined message.
As you browse the poems in this collection, compare how different writers transform similar material. One poet may make a journey literal, another inward; one may identify the beloved, another preserve mystery. Those differences show how theme becomes individual through voice, sequence, image, and tone.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a masnavi is between completion and continuation. Its paired sonic units encourage the reader to pause, remember, and sometimes treat a statement as proverbial; its larger movement asks those same units to become steps in a journey. A technically recognizable draft may produce one well-shaped pair after another, yet still lack development. A memorable poem makes each local closure alter the pressure of the whole. What has just been resolved in sound should often remain alive as a spiritual, romantic, ethical, or narrative question.
Structure feels necessary when the poem's subject also proceeds through encounter and response. A lover calls and receives silence; a seeker interprets a sign and later discovers the interpretation was incomplete; a guide's answer generates a more difficult question. In such cases, the couplets do not decorate material that could have been presented identically in prose. They become units of perception. Rhyme marks each moment of apprehension, while the sequence reveals the limitations of any single apprehension. Editors and attentive readers notice when end words carry genuine conceptual weight, when rhythm supports the authority or vulnerability of the voice, and when recurring images evolve rather than merely recur.
Common weaknesses arise when one demand overwhelms all the others. Mechanical patterning can produce padded syntax, obvious end words, or a sing-song tone unsuited to grief and awe. Predictable spiritual language may name light, truth, love, or the soul without giving those abstractions a physical life. Over-explanation can close every symbol as soon as it appears, leaving readers no mystery to inhabit. At the opposite extreme, a succession of polished but unrelated couplets may offer no cumulative discovery. Didactic purpose is strongest when wisdom has been tested by resistance, error, conflict, or sacrifice; otherwise, the poem risks sounding certain before it has earned certainty.
Individuality remains visible through the speaker's temperament and method of attention. One voice may be argumentative, another intimate, another visionary, restrained, wounded, or quietly humorous. Distinctiveness also comes from what the poet permits to remain unresolved: the identity of the beloved, the reliability of a guide, or the cost of surrender. Comparing multiple community poems develops judgment because it separates convention from inevitability. Readers begin to hear which effects belong to paired sound and sequential movement, and which belong to one poet's diction, imagery, pacing, and moral imagination. The strongest example is therefore not simply the most compliant one, but the poem in which formal recurrence and inner transformation become inseparable.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and let several community masnavis speak to one another. Compare how their poets handle the beloved, the seeker, the lesson, the unfolding story, and the movement from one couplet to the next. A thoughtful comment might identify an image that changed meaning, a turn that deepened the journey, or an ending that invited rereading.
Then try shaping your own sequence of linked discoveries. Test its sound aloud, revise until each couplet serves the larger movement, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can add another voice to the community's continuing conversation with the form.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 26 Masnavi poems, offering enough range to compare multiple interpretations without assuming that every contributor makes the same artistic choices. Some poets may follow established conventions closely, while others may adapt or challenge them in pursuit of a particular voice, story, or spiritual emphasis. Reading across the collection allows visitors to consider how shared expectations can produce markedly different experiences.
Masnavi Categories
Definition | What is Masnavi 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.
Related Poetry Forms
couplet, fard, ghazal, god, hamd, hazal, hijv, love, madah, manqabat, marsiya, masnavi, munaajaat, musaddas, naat, nazm, qasida, qataa, romantic, rubaiyat, rubayi, salaam, seharaa, spiritual, urdu, vaasokht