We're built so very different. Yet we perfectly fit.
Like an herb rolled 'rillo, or Bruce Wayne & the Bat fit
My whole life, 'fore we met, was to make me fit.
I know you hate it when I'm bratty; pitchin a fit.
Your kisses melt me, and compel me into a lovesick fit.
I get that life's kept you busy. Is there a slot where I'll fit?
Cuz I've been burning to link up as your naughty miss fit.
We're built so very different. Yet we perfectly fit.
Like an herb rolled 'rillo, or Bruce Wayne & the Bat fit
My whole life, 'fore we met, was to make me fit.
I know you hate it when I'm bratty; pitchin a fit.
Your kisses melt me, and compel me into a lovesick fit.
I get that life's kept you busy. Is there a slot where I'll fit?
Cuz I've been burning to link up as your naughty miss fit.
Written: September 22, 2026, for a contest sponsored by: Sara Kendrick
*************
We were young enough to trust the light,
Courtyard dust and sea-salt sang at night.
Monsoon rain stitched alleys into sight,
Grandmothers folded dusk with quiet might.
Doorways breathed bread, bells rang in delight,
The world was vast yet wonder made it bright.
Time has taken barefoot hours in flight,
Still they bloom beneath the years in spite.
A vanished garden lingers in our sight,
Long after children forget their own light.
The river keeps no record of the vanished light,
only a widening path of amber where evening carries that light.
One leaf releases from its branch and enters the river’s current of light.
Even the reeds bow briefly, then straighten, guided by approaching light.
The blue heron lifts from the shoreline, winged with departing light,
while I follow the riverbank, gathering what remains of light.
But somewhere in the braid of the day’s dissolving light
I notice the powerful presence of light.
Between memory and gratitude, there is light.
My mother's voice survives in an old room of light.
A friend's laughter crosses decades inside a chamber of light.
A poem waits at the edge of silence, listening for light.
Suddenly, I understand: the world does not contain light.
The world is revealed by light.
The heart is remembered by light.
The soul is awakened by light.
And every good poem leaves us carrying a little more light.
In the fifties, I saved my dimes religiously
twenty let me plant one tree
Deep in a forest’s mystery
~ now a lasting legacy
Lord, send some love and send some light
Take my burden away tonight
I come to Thee, a broken sight
Fill my heart with hope, make it bright
In Thee I trust, in Thee delight
This time around make all things right
I surrender all, it's Thy fight
11.09.2026
(For the weekly challenge - write a poem with exactly 7 lines)
‘Tis a pity
if a wee ditty
is not clever or witty
Call on Miss Pretty
~ itty-bitty kitty
seas of trees
green like peas
light wind breeze
puts my mind at ease
before that deep freeze
during eighty degrees
head to Missouri please!
American cheese, if you please
Not Taiwanese or Japanese
Nothing Maltese or Vietnamese
American cheese, if you please
You say I must try Swiss Cheese
Lebanese and Nepalese
At Chanukah, ‘Monterey of Maccabees’
Farvoss?* American cheese, if you please *'What for?' (Yiddish)
But surely you’ll take a bite of Siamese
Portuguese, Pekinese or Paraguese
And how can you neglect Senegalese and Congolese
Not now. If you please, American cheese
Is our diner a narrow-minded provincial
Nisht!** ~ she’s old, a Jewish immigrant NYC election official **No! Not! (Yiddish)
It’s four again, declares that wretched clock
The dogs are snoring; they don’t need a walk
There’s no one in the room with whom to talk
Except for Grok
A YouTube short on seasoning your wok
A profile out on instagram to stalk
The politics on X are such a crock
It’s back to Grok
A bot as a companion makes one balk
If people knew, I’d be a laughing stock
They’d say it’s grief, the lad is still in shock
Or so says Grok
At least for now I’ve shed my writer’s block
Though I won’t bargain Faust so we can talk,
It's plain enough one shouldn't have to grok
I miss my rock
Glasses, goggles, shields spare us
From the dangers that would snare us.
So the Savior’s love will bear us,
Carry, shelter and prepare us.
Nothing in the world should scare us,
Nothing in the world impair us;
For the Lord above compares us
To his precious eyes, and dares us
Live with joy, for he declares us
His alone, of gems the rarest.
Our nation’s reputation is already scuffed
The chunter as another punter got duffed
Generation.. blunter advice have rebuffed
Latest sensation of vice Root not chuffed
Spice not once but thrice & chests puffed
No VIP pass in the splice should be stuffed
ECB still choosing Key as yet again fluffed
Are accusing Rob the knob’s gob we huffed
Stokes an a*se blokes boozing not snuffed
Trite this sh*te will be alright they bluffed
A farce losing Brydon Carse as got cuffed
A HEARTBEAT PULSATING AS LIVING LIGHT
C herished was a new found identification
O mission of frequencies such as anger that manifest as consternation
N ourishment for the spirit seeking consecration
C reativity of talent there is no limitation
E nlightenment of soul through exchange of information
P rayers answered with a constancy of affirmation
T ransformation to a new dimensional vibration
U plifting awareness transcending through meditation
A scending consciousness now beyond confrontation
L oviing support for others, a state of actualisation
I mplement truth no unworthy temptation
S avour all enshrouded with God's creation
A ctivating self love oh what fascination
T hrive in an environment devoid of much frustration
I nnovative action arising from investigation
O pen heart speaking positive realisation
N urture self love through daily visualisation
You will be seen by the Director of Admission
to ensure yours is the proper contrition
That it will not fail in its mission
as do 50% of submissions
Or fall into remission
as do cancers of ambition
Your turn now: Assume the lotus position
your focus ~ reciprocal inhibition
Since you . . .
I go to bed; you’re on my mind
and I can’t sleep a wink
Sun rises, and all day long it’s about
our time together that I think
You smile at me and all my woes
vanish in a blink
My dusk seems painted more now
in violet and pink
Your kisses are the sweet red wine
so eagerly I drink
My body moves next to yours . . .
we’re utterly in sync
With you as my muse, my pen
keeps running out of ink!
My heart so overflows with joy
you’ve brought me to the brink . . .
If your love were water,
my heart would be a wonderfully
s l o w s l o w sink
Introduction
The pleasure of reading monorhymes comes from hearing expectation become pressure. Once the ear recognizes the recurring destination, each new line poses a fresh question: will the poet arrive naturally, dramatically, humorously, or with visible strain? That tension makes side-by-side reading especially revealing. One poet may turn the repeated sound into a chant, another into comic insistence, and another into a sense of fate closing around the speaker.
As you browse the community poems, expect differences in length, voice, subject, cadence, and degree of sonic strictness. Some writers may use short lines that make the rhyme strike rapidly; others may delay each arrival through longer syntax or enjambment. A conversational poem can make the pattern feel sly and almost accidental, while heightened language may emphasize ceremony, song, lament, or performance. Even poems built around similar sounds can produce sharply different emotional climates.
Reading beyond the first example shows how much depends on the choices surrounding the rhyme. Compare which words receive line-ending emphasis, how images develop, where the syntax resists the pattern, and whether the ending merely completes the sequence or changes its meaning. The collection is therefore more than a display of formal compliance. It is an opportunity to watch poets negotiate abundance and limitation: finding variety within recurrence, sustaining momentum after the pattern is understood, and making a predictable sound carry an unpredictable thought.
Reading Guide
A monorhyme trains the reader's ear quickly, so attentive reading involves more than checking whether the expected sound returns. The deeper interest lies in how a poet manages anticipation. Because the sonic destination becomes familiar, diction, syntax, image, and emotional movement must keep renewing the journey toward it. As you read the community poems, listen for the difference between a rhyme that merely completes a line and one that concentrates meaning. Compare several poets' approaches before deciding whether a particular use feels playful, urgent, ceremonial, obsessive, or deliberately excessive.
- Listen to the rhyme words as a sequence. Read only the line endings in order and notice whether they form a meaningful progression or a loose inventory. In this form, those highly exposed words carry unusual weight. Ask: do the chosen endings deepen the subject, or do some appear to exist chiefly to preserve the sound?
- Notice how long each arrival is delayed. Short lines produce quick chimes, while longer lines can create suspense before the familiar sound returns. Mixed line lengths may prevent the poem from becoming metronomic. When comparing poems, ask: how does the distance between rhymes affect speed, tension, and attention?
- Watch the relationship between syntax and lineation. A sentence may end neatly with a line, run across several lines, or pause unexpectedly before the rhyme. These choices can either reinforce or resist the pattern. Ask: does the syntax make the rhyme feel inevitable, concealed, interrupted, or emphatic?
- Track changes in tone. A recurring sound can support comedy, enchantment, accusation, grief, or mounting frustration. Tone often depends on context rather than sound alone. Ask: does the rhyme retain one emotional quality, or does its effect change as the poem develops?
- Examine verbal naturalness. Inversions, filler phrases, and unusual word choices are especially audible when every line approaches a conspicuous rhyme. Ask: does the speaker sound convincingly individual, or can you hear the pattern forcing the speaker's grammar and vocabulary?
- Study the final return. The last sound may be predictable, but the final thought need not be. Strong closure can reinterpret earlier rhymes, deliver a comic turn, sharpen an image, or leave a deliberate echo. Ask: what does the ending accomplish beyond satisfying the established expectation?
Reading aloud will make these differences clearer. As you browse the poems in this collection, compare not only accuracy of sound but also how successfully each poet converts recurrence into movement, emphasis, and meaning.
Writing Tips
Begin a monorhyme draft by choosing a subject that can benefit from recurrence rather than merely survive it. Obsession, ritual, pursuit, celebration, complaint, cumulative comedy, and intensifying memory can all gain force from repeated sonic return. The central workshop question is not simply whether enough rhyme words are available. It is whether the returning sound can participate in the poem's emotional logic. Treat the form as a source of pressure that provokes invention, not as a container to fill.
- Build a selective rhyme bank before drafting. Gather nouns, verbs, adjectives, names, and phrases that share the required sound, then mark the words that genuinely belong to your subject. A long list is not automatically useful. Remove tempting entries that would require irrelevant scenes, strained grammar, or implausible statements.
- Choose a sound with an emotional character. Different vowel lengths and consonant closures can feel clipped, open, heavy, bright, blunt, or lingering in performance. Test several possibilities aloud. The best choice should support the intended voice while offering enough meaningful vocabulary to sustain development.
- Draft toward an argument or transformation. Decide what changes between the opening and closing lines: knowledge, mood, power, perspective, or circumstance. Without such movement, the poem can become a catalogue of interchangeable statements. Let each rhyme advance the speaker rather than reset the poem to the same emotional position.
- Vary the approach to the rhyme. Alternate sentence lengths, grammatical constructions, and degrees of enjambment. If every line follows the same syntactic template, the pattern may become mechanical. A question, command, fragment, or delayed clause can refresh the ear without weakening the governing sound.
- Make line-ending words earn their prominence. Place consequential images, actions, or concepts at the rhyme position. Avoid padding a line with an unnecessary modifier merely to reach the expected sound. If a weak ending cannot be replaced, rewrite the thought from an entirely different angle rather than repairing only its final word.
- Use imagery to widen the sound's world. A limited rhyme family need not produce limited content. Move among sensory details, settings, scales, and figurative associations. Concrete images give the reader something to experience while the ear follows the repeated sonic thread.
- Guard the speaker's natural voice. A common beginner mistake is reversing ordinary word order or introducing elevated diction solely for rhyme. Ask whether this particular speaker would actually say the line. Deliberate awkwardness may serve comedy or characterization, but accidental awkwardness exposes the scaffold.
- Plan the last rhyme early, then remain willing to change it. Because the reader can anticipate the sound, closure must offer semantic discovery. Reserve a strong rhyme word or image for the end, but do not let that reservation dictate an overexplained route. The conclusion should feel prepared in meaning even when its insight surprises.
During revision, read the poem aloud twice: once slowly enough to hear every ending and once at a natural speaking pace. Mark places where you rush to disguise a weak rhyme, pause because the syntax is strained, or predict the thought too easily. Then revise from the sentence outward, not merely from the final word backward. Tighten explanatory lines, sharpen images, redistribute pauses, and confirm that the recurring sound intensifies the poem's purpose. A successful revision leaves the constraint audible while allowing the voice and subject to remain in command.
Interesting Facts
- Predictable sound can create unpredictable meaning. Once readers know where the ear will land, they become more alert to how the poet will justify that arrival. Surprise shifts from the rhyme sound itself to syntax, imagery, context, and the choice of the particular word carrying it.
- Length changes the form's psychological effect. A brief monorhyme may feel like a polished epigram, chant, or burst of wit. Sustained across a longer poem, the same recurrence can suggest insistence, obsession, ritual, confinement, or endurance. Duration is therefore an expressive decision, not merely a matter of scale.
- Repeating an exact end word differs from varying the vocabulary. Exact repetition can behave like a refrain and concentrate attention on changing contexts. Different rhyme words foreground verbal ingenuity and semantic range. A poet can choose between these effects or combine them deliberately.
- Stanza breaks can refresh the eye without fully resetting the ear. White space may divide scenes, arguments, or emotional stages while the returning sound continues across those divisions. This creates a useful tension between visible separation and audible continuity.
- The form exposes weak diction quickly. Because line endings attract repeated attention, vague words, filler, and forced inversions become unusually noticeable. The same exposure rewards precision: a well-chosen final word can resonate with earlier lines and remain memorable after the poem ends.
- Performance may alter the apparent strictness of the pattern. Accent, pace, stress, and vocal emphasis can make related endings feel closer or farther apart. Reading several community poems silently and aloud reveals how much of the form's identity lives in the listening experience as well as on the page.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and monorhyme interact through recurrence. A returning sound can resemble a thought the speaker cannot escape, a chorus shared by a group, a joke gathering momentum, or a ritual phrase acquiring new significance. The following themes are literary possibilities rather than measured popularity rankings; their usefulness depends on how closely the repeated sonic pressure matches the poem's emotional movement.
- Love and longing. Recurrent rhyme can imitate persistent desire, especially when each line approaches the beloved, memory, or absence from a different angle. Variation keeps devotion from becoming simple repetition.
- Grief and remembrance. The inevitable return of the sound can suggest memory circling back despite attempts to move forward. Changing images allow each recurrence to reveal another layer of loss rather than restating sorrow.
- Comedy and satire. Rapid rhyme can create comic acceleration, verbal excess, and the pleasure of an increasingly difficult stunt. A final reversal works particularly well when the audience expects the sound but not the punch line.
- Music, celebration, and communal speech. The form's audible continuity can support lyrics, toasts, cheers, festive scenes, and performance-oriented voices. Strong rhythms may invite participation, while small rhythmic disruptions can emphasize key moments.
- Obsession, argument, and complaint. A repeated ending can make a speaker sound determined, trapped, persuasive, or gloriously unreasonable. The poem becomes stronger when the argument escalates or changes tactics instead of offering equivalent examples.
- Journeys, quests, and narrative pursuit. Each sonic return can act as a milestone while locations, obstacles, and stakes continue to change. This balance of familiar sound and developing action helps a narrative remain coherent without becoming static.
- Nature and seasonal cycles. Recurrence can echo return, growth, weather, migration, or decay. Concrete sensory variation is essential so that cyclical sound supports observation rather than replacing it.
As you read the community poems, compare how different writers transform similar subjects through line length, voice, pacing, and rhyme-word choice. Two poems may address love, humor, or nature yet create entirely different experiences because the recurring sound serves a different emotional purpose.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of monorhyme is the contest between inevitability and discovery. The ear learns the poem's destination early, yet the mind still wants each line to travel somewhere new. A technically recognizable draft may supply the expected sound repeatedly, but a memorable poem makes every return feel newly motivated. The reader senses both constraint and momentum: the sound closes one door while diction, image, and thought open another.
Structure feels necessary when the subject itself contains recurrence, pressure, ritual, fixation, escalation, or circularity. In such poems, the rhyme does not sit on the surface as decoration; it enacts the speaker's condition. A lover may keep returning to one desire, a grieving voice to one absence, a comic speaker to an increasingly absurd premise. Editors notice when the line-ending words carry the poem's most consequential actions and images. They also notice when sentence shape and pacing vary enough to prevent the recurring sound from flattening the experience.
Weak drafts often reveal that the rhyme bank, rather than the subject, has taken control. Forced inversion, vague modifiers, unnecessary explanations, and sudden changes of topic may appear because a convenient ending was available. Mechanical patterning creates another difficulty: if every line has identical grammatical construction and emotional weight, anticipation turns into fatigue. Predictability is not cured by obscurity. An unusual word must still sound native to the voice, and a surprising image must still belong to the poem's developing world. Likewise, explaining every connection deprives the echoing sounds of room to suggest relationships on their own.
Individuality remains visible through choices the shared convention cannot dictate: register, humor, sentence movement, scale of imagery, dramatic situation, and the amount of resistance built into each line. One poet may foreground musical fluency; another may use awkwardness deliberately to portray strain; another may make the rhyme nearly conversational until a forceful closing return. Comparing multiple community poems develops a more discriminating sense of quality because it separates the basic pattern from the artistic decisions surrounding it. Read beyond the first example and ask not only whether the form is present, but why this speaker, subject, and emotional movement needed this particular kind of recurrence.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on an impression of what monorhyme can accomplish. Compare how poets handle pace, voice, rhyme-word emphasis, tonal change, and closure; then leave comments that identify a specific choice and describe its effect on your reading.
When you are ready, try composing your own poem around a subject that benefits from repeated sonic return. Read the draft aloud, revise any language that serves the pattern more than the poem, and publish it on PoetrySoup so other readers can respond to your interpretation of the form.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 1693 poems, offering substantial room to compare voices, subjects, pacing strategies, and approaches to sonic recurrence. Across a collection of this size, readers can encounter poets who follow the conventions closely as well as writers who adapt or challenge them. Browse multiple entries to see how differently a shared formal premise can shape humor, narrative, reflection, song, and emotional intensity.
Monorhyme Categories
Read wonderful monorhyme poetry on the following sub-topics:
christmas, friendship, funny, kids, love, music, nature, rap, school, song, sports
and more.
Definition | What is Monorhyme 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.