Where heather hums in Atlantic rain,
old stones remember names;
the wind through gorse like whispered pain
keens low the exile’s flames.
A curlew cries above the bog,
its call a silver thread;
it stitches sky to sodden fog
where silent feet have bled.
O Sídhe stir beneath the hill,
in twilight’s hollow breath;
their music bends the human will
to dance with time and death.
Yet green endures through grief and
Little girl lost
Without emotion
She floats on concrete
Shoes uffed over puddles
Running toward mommie
But mommie doesn't
Understand how to
feed this little
girl who is lost
And so without hope
And stranded in a
Rain Forrest she
Opens her diary
But only to close it
Without the words
She is lost for words
Lost without money
She chokes on P & B
Sandwiches
But stumiks the upsets
Of a broken Vail in her belly
She hides and trys to find somber
Sweet melodies
That will put her to sleep
Little girl lost
That's what people call her
In prison now
Hooked up to a mic now
She checks "1" 1 "2"
And speaks " who does really care"
This girl is gone and blue in the face
Of emotions
Final
Little girl lost.
A male artist loves to paint on walls --
walls within alleys behind malls
Malls of curious and innocent people that shop
Stalls where peaceful and weird people meet and hop
Under a tree the said artist usually drops
Drops of excess oil and paints sliding from his tops
From his shirt and pants pastel colors so cool
Smeared with smudges from head to toe that drool
An artist with intricate and glowing tattoos
Symbols, faces and letters inscribed in twos
On skin his views rejoice with Gogol --
famed realist and grotesque in googol
An artist who lives in an alley
Homeless and penniless, but happy
Everyday his life depends on pennies
Pennies from passers-by and fans in their twenties
One day, he was asked to work
Draw and stroke for teachers at work
Morning and afternoon he delivers his works
Free drinks and food from school he receives with forks
End of each day the artist glistens
Thanking people for help that brightens
His life regained, renewed without delay
Tears of joy like it's Christmas everyday!
Men,
I think I'm color blind
The way I see, no color on the skin
Is white lucid?
Or is it black being hazy
Ain't no love for White
Neither loyalty for Black
Don't just be preaching Black Lives Matter
How about if we all matter
Speak against discrimination
Men, speak against segregation
It's all against the laws of God
Remember, we all created
In the image and likeness of God
I bet, therefore, you and I should hold hands
Our conscience is rational
That means our thoughts need to be radical
For whether we work for good or evil
We'll all be judged on the same scale
And it's either the promised Heaven
Or the bottomless Hell
Surviving Pawn
While the Sun was winking at the Green planet...
Seven colors cavorting in May
Winds swayed, lulled and clasped clouds like hay
Colors above clouds tilted and frolic
As Winds soared, fly o'er North Atlantic.
Seven shades that waft under shimmy skies
Shading trees and lagoons like brumed pies
Colored blades enamoured by nature's wonders
Inlying blessed planet, emitting in numbers.
Clouds flair, tireless of its athletic heels
Swirling in air, running like spinning wheels
Reels and Winds giggled at Clouds' cycles
Clouds gasped and wept with flaming icicles...
.
there'z nuhth'n hot'r
there'z
there'z
okay okay
(mind ya)
i just received my
new prescription for
my progressive
len'ziz (sooo timely)
so
anywho
i step'd outside uv
my favorite water'n hole
and there were her'z (across thuh road)
her
pure white
soft star stud'd
lump'd up (where lips go)
panty's puff
She wore a ribbon red as flame,
he carved her secret in his name.
They danced beneath the open skies,
with stars like lanterns in their eyes.
The campfire laughed, the horses swayed,
the fiddles sang while nightbirds prayed.
Their vows were stitched with whispered thread,
"Till death," they swore, "no tears to shed."
But Fortune's wheel turned rough and wild--
the lawman came to claim their child.
A fortune-teller saw too late--
the cards had sealed a crooked fate.
They rode like ghosts through iron rain,
the mountains swallowed up their pain.
Yet dawn betrayed their broken flight--
two shadows fell in dying light.
The caravan still hums their song,
a love too bright, a loss too strong.
And every fire that gypsies light,
still weeps for them across the night.
Some say when midnight paints the skies,
you'll hear their laughter where it lies--
two spirits twirling hand in hand,
forever free across the land.
Along the road where moonbeams spill,
the gypsy wagons wander still.
Their lanterns swing like fireflies caught,
each wheel a whisper, each song a thought.
The fiddler hums a ghostly tune,
that weaves beneath the weeping moon.
A tambourine keeps time with dreams,
and horses wade through silver streams.
No map can mark the path they tread,
no stone remembers where they led.
They chase the winds, they court the skies,
with fortune shining in their eyes.
And if you chance to hear their song,
it means your heart won't rest for long.
For once you glimpse the roaming stars,
your soul will follow gypsy scars.
where is she? where is she? asked the emperor
the lady with the candle must not be found...
do you think the captain of this ship is blind?
the anchored ship must not be caught...
the baby in the cradle starts to sob
but no one near must be found...
the red cap! the red cap! says the man in white
it is the moment when the lightning must strike...
the red carpet and the fall of crown
she must not be found,lady in light pink gown...
1952. Curfew was on and roads were vacant.
Some armed hands were still haunting there
To hush every possible roar or uprising rant
With the spiteful hammer of thunderous fear.
But a murmur of revolution was soon heard
As thousands of spirited people marched on
With the resilience of restoring their barred
Language from the threshold of extinction.
They protested peacefully carrying placard
Of their clauses until the armed hands fired
And soaked them with blood in vain to retard
Undying voices that can never be smothered.
Each drop of the sacrificial blood has built
the monument of revolution that will always
Shine as a star of Devotion and forever quilt
The vigorous souls with its contagious rays.
Their immortal death blazed a fire of liberty
in hearts that were in the grip of oppression.
Soon, it became a furnace that burned Deity
Of Oppression and Bangladesh was born.
Life is short
But love can be shorter
I wonder if love could ever be overwhelming
I wonder if we could ever get tired of love
I wonder if we’d push people away because they love us
Is that what love is really about?
I wonder if the foundation of love could be mistrust
Re-echoing and resounding worst memories
I wonder if love is desultory
And probably depends on happening situations
Like a bag on a windy desert
True Love they say never fades
But does it even last for ages
I’ve been digging for days
Surfing and scattering the mains
Where goes love?
Down our tummies?
So, they don’t last?
Or up in our chest ?
Like an undetectable malformation ?
Or skyrocketing to brains?
Probably why we go crazy about the people we love
I really hope it’s all not a mirage
But rather true reflections of genuine affection
And not delusion of fantasies
The only thing we wish to see in our images
An aura of love strongly bonded across our hearts
Where distance cannot even stand a chance
Of separating the ones we love
But I still ask from the bottom of my mind
What is love??
Son of the rising sun; a child of prowess.
Hatched from the spawn of the raiders' conquest.
He rose from the trail of the claws that raid.
His sage was a tale that became a legend.
His serene spirit yearned for awareness.
He sailed across seas to muster the knowledge.
But his quest for freedom dragged his feet back to home,
where the heart of wisdom was long-waiting to hone.
He fought fiercely with his pen in quest for liberty
when the wrath of men clamored for anarchy.
His sagacious spirit wielded the courage
of the soldiers that craved to ward off the raid.
He offered his life glancing at the dawn
so the gloomy eyes in grief would see the rising sun.
His blood that spilled has fueled the fury
that snatched liberty from the claws of foray.
February 27, 2023
Writing Challenge - H Words - Poetry Contest (3rd place)
Sponsored By: Constance La France
Goddess from heaven
with a top of golden;
Descended like an omen
to brighten the minds of men.
She sings deeply well;
She dances like an angel;
She acts like it's real
and casts away her spell.
Her beauty that enslaves
enthralls the heart that craves;
Her body that gyrates
stirs the drowsy spirits.
Her sweet smile with spell
is filed with deep meaning;
Only the rightful hearts may tell
what lies deep within.
But it's her flipping hair
That sends all eyes to snare
Like her name on a paper
That blows up her ember
I wish I lived in her time
So she might remember me
Her faded memory
Struck the heart of sympathy
But the legend of her smile
Still lives in memory
For her glorious divine
Is a track in history
February 24, 2023
Goddess of sultry
As adored by many
Her hair golden
Makes the heart smitten
Like a lily of white
A rose with astride
Makes the wind like
To take away her wrap
Her mysterious craze
Puts the soul in deep amaze
Just like a baffling maze
That puts the mind in daze
Her alluring beauty
Conceived its own meaning
Just like history
That is worth remembering
Her tempting speech
Awakens the drowsy spirits
Just like a rhapsody
That brings surge of ecstasy
Her oozing appeal
Has captured the hearts of greats
Her legend, like her zeal
Has charted great feats
But the parting of her stare
Could still be mystery
No one dared much to unsnare
The twists of history
Though she's gone with the wind
In the river of no return
Her charm like a whirlwind
Is enshrined in souls that yearn
February 24, 2023
Like the North Wind,
Sent by Boreas
to lay driven snow, pure
and white, an ivory
whirlwind blows
through my living room.
The rodent, pink as
embarrassment, flies
with the speed of a
crossbow bolt loosed at
full tension. It’s woolen
body, firm but pliable.
The ashen animals
bear claws sharp as
thorns, attacking with the
ferocity of a defensive
rose garden. They strive
for the kill, dilated pupils
take on the shape of
fully waxed moons, the color
of pitch; an eclipse of
bloodlust. Eagerly, but
methodically the blanched
aggressors approach the
rosy mouse and with
muscles tensed, as taut as
moorings, they leap.
Their lithe, slim, dextrous
bodies fly through the
air. In a blizzard of ferocity
the rodent is struck down
and the ivory whirlwind
abates back into a pile
of freshly driven snow.
1/12/23 for “Metrical Tale”
Sponsored by Hilo Poet
Introduction
The pleasure of reading a story in verse comes from feeling two kinds of movement at once: events carry the reader forward, while cadence, imagery, and line breaks invite moments of delay. A journey may pause over a doorway, a romance may turn on one repeated phrase, or a supernatural encounter may gather force through accumulating sounds. In a metrical tale, what happens matters, but so does the manner in which the telling makes each happening memorable.
As you read the community poems, expect different balances between storyteller and song. One poet may emphasize swift, clearly connected action; another may linger over landscape, domestic detail, or a character's private response. Some tales may sound conversational, while others cultivate ceremonial, humorous, ominous, or ballad-like effects. The narrative may advance through scenes, recollection, dialogue, commentary, or a sequence of vivid episodes. These choices alter how close readers feel to the characters and how urgently they anticipate the next event.
Reading several examples side by side reveals possibilities that a single poem cannot represent. Compare how different writers decide what to dramatize, summarize, repeat, or leave unstated. Notice where the verse slows an event that prose might dispatch quickly, and where patterned language speeds the telling. Consider, too, whether the ending resolves an outward action, changes the narrator's understanding, or leaves the sequence echoing beyond its final lines. Browsing the poems in this collection turns the form into a living workshop: each interpretation offers another answer to the challenge of making narrative continuity and poetic intensity sustain one another.
Reading Guide
Read a metrical tale with attention divided productively between story and verse. First follow the events without stopping to diagnose every technique; then return to the places where anticipation sharpened, time seemed to slow, or an image remained after the action moved on. Those moments often reveal how the poet has shaped narrative material through voice, sound, and lineation. When comparing community poems, ask not only which tale interests you, but how each poet controls the distance between an event and the language used to recount it.
- Trace the narrative engine. Identify what keeps one event connected to the next: a desire, journey, promise, mystery, conflict, memory, or moral question. This matters because an extended verse narrative can contain many attractive passages yet lose momentum without a governing pressure. What makes you want to continue in each poem?
- Listen to the storyteller. Notice whether the voice witnesses events, participates in them, remembers them later, or speaks with broad authority. The narrator's position controls intimacy and trust. What does one poet's speaker know, conceal, interpret, or misunderstand that another speaker might handle differently?
- Watch the exchange between scene and summary. A poet can dramatize one minute across many lines and compress years into a brief transition. This modulation prevents an event sequence from becoming a flat chronicle. Which moments receive space, and what does that allocation suggest about their emotional importance?
- Study line and stanza pacing. Enjambment can pull the eye toward the next action, while a firm pause can make a decision or revelation land heavily. Stanza breaks may mark changes in place, time, speaker, or emotional temperature. Where does the visual arrangement accelerate or interrupt the story?
- Follow the sound without demanding uniformity. Recurring rhythms, rhymes, consonants, or phrases can bind distant episodes and help readers retain names, images, and motives. Overly conspicuous patterning, however, may compete with the action. Does the music support the tone, or call attention away from it?
- Mark image-bearing details. A gate, garment, weather change, household object, or patch of landscape can do more than decorate a scene; it can carry continuity across the tale. Which images return or change, and how do they gather significance as events accumulate?
- Evaluate the ending's reach. Closure may settle an action, disclose a consequence, sharpen a moral tension, or return to an earlier image with altered meaning. Ask whether the final passage grows from the preceding sequence or merely explains what readers should conclude.
Read beyond the first example and compare your answers. The strongest differences often appear not in subject matter alone, but in how poets distribute attention across action, reflection, music, and silence.
Writing Tips
Begin with material that wants to be told across time. A single emotion may produce a lyric, but a metrical tale benefits from change: someone departs, discovers, chooses, loses, returns, remembers, or understands differently. Before drafting, tell the story aloud in plain language. If you can identify its source of forward pressure and the moments where the telling naturally intensifies, you have a useful foundation. The task is then to make verse indispensable rather than to arrange prose events in shortened lines.
- Build a flexible story spine. Write down the essential sequence in a few sentences, including the initial disturbance and the consequential final moment. This is not a rigid outline; it is a way to distinguish necessary events from background. A common beginner mistake is recording every step because it occurred in the imagined chronology. Preserve only what develops expectation, character, atmosphere, or meaning.
- Choose the narrator's distance deliberately. A participant can offer urgency and limitation, while a retrospective teller can foreshadow, interpret, or regret. An observant narrator may give a simple event communal or moral resonance. Decide what the speaker knows at each stage, and resist explaining information that the chosen voice could reveal more powerfully through attitude or omission.
- Alternate dramatized scenes with connective passages. Give decisive encounters room for gesture, dialogue, and sensory detail, then cross less important intervals efficiently. If every incident receives equal space, the tale feels mechanically paced. If everything is summarized, readers never inhabit the action. Let expansion signal importance.
- Develop a musical current suited to the story. Establish enough rhythmic or sonic continuity to carry the ear through extended narration, but do not twist syntax or choose inaccurate words merely to complete a rhyme. Formal compliance becomes counterproductive when readers notice the verbal contrivance before the character's danger, tenderness, or discovery.
- Use line breaks as narrative instruments. Break before a revealing word to create anticipation, after a decisive statement to give it weight, or across a phrase to convey haste and instability. Avoid making every line a self-contained sentence unless that measured, declarative effect serves the narrator. Varying pause and continuation can reproduce the tempo of action.
- Assign imagery structural work. Select a few concrete details capable of changing with the tale: a lamp that first welcomes and later exposes, a road altered by weather, or an object passed between characters. Recurrent images give readers points of recognition and can communicate development without explanatory commentary.
- Make characters legible through action and speech. Instead of pausing to catalogue traits, let a person delay at a threshold, answer indirectly, protect an object, or repeat a revealing phrase. Dialogue can quicken a long narrative, but each exchange should change knowledge, pressure, or relationship rather than merely restate the situation.
- Earn the ending rather than attaching a lesson. A moral or reflective conclusion is strongest when consequences have already made it perceptible. Likewise, a happy, tragic, uncanny, or unresolved close should answer the poem's deepest pressure, not simply stop the sequence. Return to an earlier sound or image when doing so reveals genuine transformation.
During revision, read the entire draft aloud, preferably in more than one sitting. Mark places where your breath, attention, or belief falters. Tighten connective language, test whether sound patterns remain natural, and check that major images are vivid but not over-described. Ask a reader to recount both the sequence and the emotional turning point; if one is clear and the other missing, rebalance story and poetry. Finally, inspect the last passage against the opening so the destination feels surprising in detail yet inevitable in retrospect.
Interesting Facts
- Narrative simplicity can require considerable selection. A clearly connected sequence looks effortless only when the poet has removed distracting explanations and minor incidents. The challenge is not merely inventing events, but deciding which few transitions allow readers to cross a larger span without confusion.
- Verse can alter the apparent speed of time. A brief action may occupy a stanza because rhythm, repetition, and line breaks magnify it, while a long interval may pass in several words. This elasticity lets emotional duration differ from clock time without breaking narrative continuity.
- A tale does not need constant external conflict to create movement. Repeated domestic tasks, seasonal changes, or encounters with a familiar place can accumulate meaning through altered perception. Connected episodes may produce an emotional arc even when the outward circumstances remain modest.
- Sound functions as a memory system. In an extended poem, recurring cadences, phrases, and sonic textures can help readers recognize a character, place, warning, or promise when it returns. The pattern matters most when it carries narrative information as well as musical pleasure.
- The narrator can become part of the suspense. Readers may wonder not only what happened, but why the speaker tells it now, which details are emphasized, and whether hindsight has changed the account. A straightforward sequence can therefore support subtle questions about reliability, guilt, affection, or memory.
- Endings reshape everything before them. A final consequence, recognition, or image can transform an apparently light adventure into regret, or reveal tenderness beneath an ominous account. When browsing the poems in this collection, compare how much each ending resolves and how much it asks readers to reconsider.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form interact through duration. A metrical tale gives a theme room to emerge from consequences rather than from declaration alone: love can be tested by delay, courage by repeated trials, and grief by the ordinary events that continue afterward. The following are literary possibilities, not statistical rankings of the community collection.
- Love under pressure. Courtship, separation, loyalty, jealousy, and reunion benefit from sequential development because feeling becomes credible through choices and costs. Verse can also give promises, names, and remembered phrases a recurring musical charge.
- Journeys and quests. Travel provides a natural line of forward movement while allowing landscapes, encounters, and obstacles to mark stages of inner change. Different poets can make the road adventurous, comic, spiritual, dangerous, or quietly reflective.
- Home and domestic life. Meals, work, family customs, neighboring households, and familiar rooms can sustain a tale when small alterations accumulate. Lineation can linger over ordinary objects until they become witnesses to affection, conflict, endurance, or loss.
- The supernatural and uncanny. Apparitions, warnings, transformations, strange bargains, and haunted places thrive on controlled revelation. Repeated sounds or images can establish foreboding, while the narrator's degree of belief determines whether the tale feels terrifying, wondrous, or ambiguous.
- Moral choice and consequence. Temptation, generosity, betrayal, pride, and forgiveness gain force when readers observe actions unfolding rather than receiving an abstract lesson. The ending can clarify consequences without reducing complex characters to examples.
- Memory and phases of life. Childhood, departure, aging, bereavement, and return allow past and present to converse. A retrospective voice can compress years, dwell on one decisive scene, and reveal how later knowledge changes the meaning of an earlier event.
- Community stories and local legend. A family anecdote, neighborhood figure, workplace incident, or inherited account can combine individual experience with collective memory. Refrains and recurring descriptions may give the telling an oral, shared quality without sacrificing personal perspective.
As you read the community poems, compare how writers transform similar material through pace, narrative distance, imagery, and closure. Two poets may begin with comparable journeys or losses yet create entirely different experiences by deciding what to dramatize, what to repeat, and what to leave resonating beyond the ending.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between narrative momentum and poetic attention. Story urges the reader onward to discover what happens; verse asks the reader to hear, see, and dwell. A technically recognizable poem can contain connected events and patterned language yet remain inert if these impulses operate separately. A memorable metrical tale makes them interdependent. The music intensifies expectation, an image carries information forward, and a line break changes how an action is perceived. The poem could not simply be reformatted as prose without losing part of its meaning.
Strong structure feels necessary when every expansion, transition, and recurrence answers the tale's emotional pressure. An important encounter may slow into sensory detail because the character cannot move past it psychologically. A repeated phrase may alter as loyalty becomes doubt or fear becomes knowledge. A stanza break may cross years, while an enjambed sentence may hurry through danger. Editors and attentive readers notice this alignment: the poem's temporal shape, sonic texture, and visual pacing reinforce the subject rather than decorate an already completed story.
Weak drafts often become predictable in one of two directions. Some narrate so dutifully that each event receives the same weight, producing a verse chronicle without dramatic hierarchy. Others pursue rhyme or rhythmic regularity so aggressively that syntax stiffens, filler enters, and characters speak in language no person or convincing narrator would choose. Over-explanation can also close every interpretive space, especially when a concluding lesson merely repeats consequences the poem has already shown. At the opposite extreme, insufficient development may present a chain of episodes without establishing why the next event matters. The remedy is not necessarily more plot, but clearer pressure: desire, danger, promise, mystery, obligation, or changing understanding.
Individuality remains visible through selection and stance. Shared conventions do not determine whether a poet lingers over weather or dialogue, tells from innocence or hindsight, treats an improbable event humorously or solemnly, or ends with resolution or an afterimage. Comparing multiple community poems develops judgment because quality cannot be reduced to surface resemblance. One example may excel through swift action and lucid storytelling; another through atmosphere, tonal complexity, or the gradual transformation of a repeated image. Reading across the collection helps visitors distinguish convention from artistic choice and technical completion from the deeper coherence that makes a tale worth remembering.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on what a metrical tale can accomplish. Compare how poets handle narrators, transitions, recurring images, musical patterns, and endings; the contrasts are as instructive as the shared approach. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a specific moment where story and verse strengthen one another.
Then try shaping a sequence of your own. Choose an event that changes through the telling, test its movement aloud, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can add another voice, pace, subject, and set of creative decisions to the ongoing conversation.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 2862 poems, offering readers substantial scope to encounter and compare multiple interpretations of the metrical tale. As you browse, keep in mind that individual poets may follow familiar conventions closely, adapt them to a particular narrative voice, or challenge expectations through pacing, sound, lineation, and closure. The collection is therefore most useful when read comparatively rather than as a set of identical models.
Metrical Tale Categories
Definition | What is Metrical Tale 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.