The Rebel
The rain drums
splattering rhyming melodies
Lightning flickers
dancing delightfully
as thunder renders
a resounding applause
Amidst the rumbling rankle
a man is silent
Baffled by the fleeting beauty
as the heavenlies
seemingly sits dim
The sun peeps
cracking open
the blackened clouds
birthing hopes in trickles
fostering attempts
to remove the shackles
strapping us to yesterday
I am wandering the wilderness of life searching,
'tortured by the taste of touch' and desire,
I feel the heart and pulse of the forest,
the cadence, the rise and fall, the music of Wind
through the trees- he is whispering and calling my name,
as leaves and flower petals dance and twirl-
Oh, Wind, my love- I have hungered for your caress.
working on my poem
We whisked up a plot in a mixing bowl
A getaway scheme with a sugar soul
A cake so slick it could rock and roll
Baked for a birthday out of control
We folded in flour with a secret plan
A covert swirl only we could scan
Not a saw blade…nah…but a steel pan fan
Spinning like a rhythm in a marching band
We iced it thick with a coded glaze
Frosting that hid our exiting ways
Candles flickered like getaway rays
Lighting up paths through the maze
We sliced that cake with a rhyme made key
The layers unlocked like a mystery
Chocolate doors swung open free
We slipped out smooth as poetry
A birthday treat with a jailbreak twist
Our sweet escape wrapped in a sugar mist
A rhyme lined route we couldn’t resist
Freedom baked fresh in every tryst
There are three stages along the path
Of realization and accomplishment.
The first involves outer form,
Keeping the discipline, persevering
Even when there is no light.
The second begins when awareness dawns,
A glimpse of our true nature
Like a shy fish looking up out of the pond.
This is the stage of true faith and devotion
As this insight of inner light becomes the center.
The third stage is just more of the second,
A repeated familiarity with our basic nature
Through direct experience and awareness.
With familiarity comes a softening of the edges
A loosening at the core.
As the sublime becomes the everyday,
The shy fish now a flock of starlings
Confident in their numbers
Fluid and graceful in their murmuration,
A cloud of unknowing for all to see.
(9/22/26)
High society has always been
High above the rest
High in their castle and oasis
High in the penthouse and palace
High in the big house and gated suburb.
While the rest wander the hills and fields
Streets and alleys, making a living
Or scraping a living.
Seeking greener lands of the free
Ever westward;
Pilgrims and pioneers, trappers and traders
Roughnecks and rednecks
Seeking their own jackpot
From the Klondike to Vegas.
High and low have always existed side by side
One above, one below
It’s no different today
Just more of both
With the gap between wider than ever.
But what really is high and low?
Are those at the top better as well as richer,
And those at the bottom really less than?
One man’s wealth is another’s poverty
The loss of freedom within a gilded cage.
What is richness, or beauty, for that matter
If it is only measured against another
And not a natural quality of just being alive?
The gap between have and have nots
Is material, but that gap is easier to cross
Than the inner gap that doesn’t know
And cannot see what real wealth, beauty
Freedom and exalted being really means.
(9/22/26)
Old Love Affair
clouds linger
outside my chamber
a gust of air
breaks silence
I bear
unfinished conversations
two years ago
of poems shared
with someone
who called me
to a grocery aisle
to clean up a spill
and she stood by me
a trial in life shared
now it looks like rain
a cool September day
first of the fall
the housecat I fed
wanders room-to-room
restless and searching
for his time and place
I suppose a shower
would do me good
but memories can never
be washed away, but I
learn to live again.
From behind velvet,
curtains drawn,
I peer with,
a glowing faculty,
of sentient,
embryonic paradox,
at entranced,
visual vine creeper,
that tiptoe cagey,
post dawn revealed,
picturesque glimpses,
stickler for the blind,
who treat with,
scorn dumbfound,
paradisal plinths,
metaphors for,
mountain tower apex,
or ground level placard,
to undulating urban,
tracts lavish,
where cerulean sky,
and town gossamer
mesh
When Post-modernists say race or gender
Is a social construct,
They’re not really saying anything
Other than we don’t like your definitions.
Since race and gender are words
Based on conceptual classifications
They are no different than any other words.
In this way everything is a social construct
Depending on the world view of the society.
The difference in animate and inanimate?
Just a social construct.
The difference in plant and animal?
Just a social construct.
The difference in positive and negative,
Black and white, good and evil, up and down
Me and you? Just a social construct.
We live in a world of such constructs,
They allow us to function
And manipulate this world.
And yes, that includes manipulating others
If you are so inclined.
Who doesn’t live in such a distinct
And discriminating world?
The new born infant at the portal of life,
And the mentally dementiaed at the edge of death.
The rest of us, are thank goodness,
Somewhere in between.
(9/19/26)
You in the shadow of your room
A young woman, not yet in your prime
Following the ways of your mother
Pulling strands of deepest indigo blue
And richest madder reds
Across the woolen warp of the loom.
Knotting nimbly as you go,
Mind relaxed, absorbed, immersed
Transported hour after hour
Day after day, month by month
A youth protected and well spent
In the deepest reaches of ancestral time.
When it’s done
You will have woven a masterpiece
Something you will quietly glow with
Something that will long outlast you
Your children, grandchildren, great
Grandchildren and culture.
You will have created a portal
Reaching across time
And space, across cultures
To suck in and absorb
The world weary
To another world.
In this other world
Children laugh and play as children do
But also learn the ways of deepest time
And spend their days apprenticing
In the ways of subtle earthy magic
The ways of warp and weft, knot and dye.
A world beyond time
In a space where lovers meet
Babies sleep
And the old die in peace
Held together on the sturdy loom
Of traditions, bound by hardship and love.
(9/18/26)
Step by gradual step,
finger tips on handrail,
beam on countenance,
I countenance a beam,
day in urban green park,
with bosom shadows,
red blazing sunshine,
that watchful radiance,
mock orange hedge,
that aromatic flourish,
hint from my instinct,
watch each rung,
don’t slip or stumble,
with wistful wallow,
silken counsel I heed,
yet further episodes,
vivid dream intrusion,
a sea of blue asters,
butterfly kaleidoscope,
on nimble nectar quest,
but now I stand astride,
on landing at the top,
casting hazel eyed,
downward glance,
on another golden,
snapshot on earth
A white tear bled from the foil seam,
a cold, lactic rot sliding down her woven leather heel,
drawing a pale, sour map across her instep.
I watched the porcelain skin of her shoe drink the milk,
and in that quiet curdling, my entire small frame snapped.
A choir of jagged iron shrieked beneath my skull,
tearing through the bone and behind my eyes:
a ruined child deserves no sun.
I did not wait for any reflex.
I dragged myself by the throat,
spat curses into my own ears,
and ran.
I bolted past the garden gate,
past the tall, unbothered grass,
my bare feet slapping the dirt in a rhythm of
self - contempt and fault.
In the damp dark behind the compost heap,
I pressed my face into the stinging nettles,
scraping my knees against the jagged limestone,
offering my own raw, bleeding shins to the air
to pay the debt for what I had done
praying the earth would swallow the wretched thing I was.
Contest: The Unseen Poetry
Prompt: The thing that was never said
Sponsor: Sotto Poet
She had to leave the country suddenly.
Niether she nor I chose for it to be this way.
There was this thing that was never said.
There is an aching inside the soul when there's
Someone to whom you never got to say goodbye.
I did not realize it at the time,
But in short order, I was certain that
The relationship was not meant to be.
Still, there was this thing that was never said.
Strangely enough, a similar occurrence happened
A second time. There was a brife romance that
Did not continue for very different reasons. We
Were like a plane that never got airborne. The
Love was intack, but the facts quietly spoke and
said, 'No'. We parted company and chose not
To say goodbye.
Again, for different reasons, under different
circumstances, there was this thing that was
never said. We never said, "Goodbye".
I sit enthralled,
on mesh bench,
honeycomb pattern,
close of afternoon,
jaw-dropping stretch ,
cars drift by,
cordial wave,
from otherworldly,
enigmatic stranger,
whose astral path,
I may have crossed,
in urban flyby,
face to face,
amidst sojourn littered,
with ethereal clouds,
glowing chatters,
sunny disposition,
from affable dwellers,
gladsome day experience,
now whither that,
mystery figure
She notes how the days
have grown shorter.
A cacophony of grackles
near a cornfield fills the air.
A farmer across the road
walks along his field
checking his corn before harvest.
Leaves rustling
in the wind sing.
The construction crew
has passed her driveway.
She asks the flagger to
help her daughter across.
The school bus arrives
late afternoon. Lights flash
She rushes onto the porch
and hugs her daughter
who wears a backpack.
The mother notices
the sky is gold
as she looks out the window
and cooks supper on the stove.
Her daughter sits in a chair
hands folded on her lap.
So good to see her daughter
she thinks after letting go
in the morning and waiting
for a late afternoon embrace.
From childhood
To adulthood
Many things we faced
Before we overcome
Emerging who we are today
Some mistakes
We don't want to repeat
Because it keeps us in the pit.
Mistake repeated
Are lessons forfeited
Mercy after forgiveness
Is not useless
All we practiced
Because we ain't perfect
Rapid growth our goals
Always finding a way to be on top
We don't want to be
A result of our society
Because it comes with insults
Standing out wasn't easy
But we always hold
Tight to our dreams
Steadily believing even when
The odds are against us
That one day we'll triumph.
Introduction
A reader enters a narrative poem with two appetites at once: the wish to know what happens next and the wish to linger over language. That tension makes these community poems rewarding to read side by side. One poet may rush toward a decisive encounter; another may delay the event through memory, atmosphere, or a narrator's hesitation. The story's movement keeps pulling forward, while the poem's images, sounds, and line endings ask for attention in the present moment.
As you browse the poems in this collection, expect differences of scale and method. A writer may build around one charged instant, unfold several connected scenes, retell an inherited tale, or let a speaker reconstruct events whose meaning remains uncertain. Some poems may depend on dialogue and physical action; others may place the real drama inside recollection, guilt, discovery, or changing perception. Stanzas can behave like scenes, pauses, leaps in time, or shifts in emotional pressure. Rhyme and rhythm may lend an account momentum, ritual, humor, or unease, while freer approaches can imitate interrupted memory or conversational speech.
Reading beyond the first example reveals how much storytelling depends on selection. Every poet decides what to dramatize, what to summarize, what to withhold, and where to stop. Compare several poets' approaches to similar human situations and notice how different choices produce sympathy, suspense, distance, or surprise. The collection is therefore more than a set of stories in verse: it is an opportunity to study how poetic attention changes the experience of an event.
Reading Guide
Read each poem first for the developing situation, then return to examine how the telling controls your knowledge and response. Narrative momentum can make a reader hurry, so a second reading is especially valuable: it reveals the line breaks, recurring images, tonal signals, and strategic omissions that were working beneath the sequence of events. As you read the community poems, compare not only what occurs but also who is permitted to tell it, how quickly the account moves, and what emotional meaning the ending gives to everything before it.
- The opening contract: Notice what the first lines establish and what they leave unsettled. An opening may offer a place, a conflict, a voice, or a question whose answer pulls the poem forward. Ask: what expectation does this poet create, and when is it fulfilled, revised, or denied?
- Narrative distance: Identify how close the speaker stands to the event. A participant can provide urgency but may misunderstand what is happening; a retrospective speaker can interpret the past while exposing regret or bias. Ask: what could another witness tell differently?
- Scene and summary: Mark where the poem slows into gesture, dialogue, or sensory detail and where it crosses hours or years in a few words. This control of duration determines which moments carry weight. Ask: why has the poet spent lines here but moved quickly elsewhere?
- Lineation and sound: Listen for sentences that run across line endings, abrupt stops, rhythmic acceleration, rhyme, or repeated phrasing. These elements can intensify pursuit, hesitation, inevitability, or comic timing. Ask: does the verse encourage you to race ahead or pause before the next revelation?
- Character through evidence: Observe what characters do, say, notice, avoid, or misremember. Direct explanation can flatten complexity, while a revealing action may imply an entire relationship. Ask: which detail most changes your judgment of a character, and did the poet earn that change?
- Images that carry the story: Look for an object, place, weather pattern, or sensory detail that returns with altered meaning. Such images bind lyric concentration to narrative development. Ask: how does the image differ after the event has unfolded?
- The final perspective: Consider whether the ending resolves an action, reframes it, or leaves its consequences active. Closure need not answer every question, but it should affect how the preceding lines are understood. Ask: what has changed-the situation, the speaker, the reader's knowledge, or all three?
Read beyond the first example and test these questions across contrasting poems. Comparison makes each poet's decisions more visible without requiring every writer to tell a story in the same manner.
Writing Tips
Begin with an event that contains pressure rather than with a complete explanation of everything surrounding it. The most promising material usually includes a change in knowledge, allegiance, danger, desire, or self-understanding. Your task is not to preserve every fact as though writing a report. It is to discover which moments become more powerful when arranged through poetic voice, image, rhythm, and silence.
- Choose a consequential center: A journey, argument, discovery, disappearance, mistake, or reunion can work, but the event needs an emotional center. Ask what becomes different because it happened. A mere sequence of actions often feels like prose notes broken into lines; consequence creates an arc.
- Enter near the pressure point: Beginners sometimes spend too long supplying family history, geography, or explanation before anything becomes urgent. Start where expectation is already forming, then introduce background only when it changes the reader's understanding of the present action.
- Decide who controls the account: Give the narrator a reason for telling this event now. Distance, age, guilt, affection, defensiveness, and incomplete knowledge all shape diction and selection. A voice becomes compelling when its way of telling reveals something beyond the facts it reports.
- Balance scene with compression: Dramatize the moments in which a choice, discovery, or relationship turns. Compress travel, routine, and elapsed time unless those passages create necessary atmosphere. If every moment receives equal space, the poem loses emphasis; if everything is summarized, the reader cannot inhabit the experience.
- Make line breaks perform narrative work: Break a line to suspend a crucial word, complicate a sentence, accelerate movement, or create a double meaning-not merely to make prose look poetic. If you adopt rhyme, meter, or a repeated pattern, allow it to intensify the event. Forced inversions and filler added for compliance weaken both voice and credibility.
- Use concrete details selectively: Choose the stain on a sleeve, the unfinished meal, or the sound beyond a door when it reveals character or changes tension. An inventory of scenery can stall the account. The strongest image often participates in the action and gathers meaning as the poem proceeds.
- Let dialogue create friction: Characters rarely need to say exactly what they feel or what both already know. A brief exchange can disclose power, evasion, intimacy, or misunderstanding. Read spoken passages aloud and remove explanatory phrases when tone and context already carry the meaning.
- Control chronology rather than obeying it: Straight sequence offers clarity and momentum, while flashback, foreshadowing, or withheld information can create resonance. Use a time shift because it changes interpretation, not simply to manufacture a surprise. Readers should feel productively reoriented rather than deprived of essential evidence.
- End at the point of altered meaning: Resist attaching a moral after the event has already delivered one. The final image, action, or recognition should create consequence without explaining every implication. An open ending succeeds when uncertainty is charged; it fails when the poem has not developed enough to make uncertainty matter.
During revision, outline the draft scene by scene and note what each passage contributes. Cut repeated explanation, strengthen weak transitions, and test whether the important turn receives enough space. Then read aloud for monotonous sentence lengths, accidental rhyme, clogged syntax, and pacing that contradicts the action. Finally, ask a reader to recount what changed and where attention weakened. Their response will show whether the poem's story and its poetic experience have become inseparable.
Interesting Facts
- Freedom creates its own difficulty. Because a narrative poem can accommodate many lengths, voices, and verse patterns, the poet must invent a convincing principle of selection. The absence of one required surface design makes pacing, emphasis, and omission more-not less-important.
- What is omitted can become part of the action. A missing explanation, skipped year, or avoided name may create suspense or reveal a speaker's reluctance. Omission works when surrounding details give the silence pressure; otherwise, it can feel like information withheld only to manipulate the reader.
- A line ending can serve two clocks. The sentence moves according to grammar, while the story moves according to expectation. When a crucial verb, object, or revelation crosses a line, the small delay can imitate hesitation, danger, discovery, or comic timing.
- Repetition need not halt the story. A recurring phrase or image can change meaning as circumstances change. It may first sound comforting, later ironic, and finally accusatory, allowing the poem to measure emotional development without directly announcing it.
- The ending can alter the apparent genre of the experience. A final recognition may make an adventure feel elegiac, turn a domestic anecdote into an ethical dilemma, or expose humor inside fear. Readers often remember not only what happened but the perspective from which they were left viewing it.
- Reading aloud tests more than musicality. Breath reveals overpacked exposition, dialogue exposes unnatural phrasing, and rhythm shows whether an urgent scene moves too slowly. In performance, a pause can function like a cut between scenes or a moment when the narrator cannot yet continue.
- Comparison clarifies possibility. As you browse the community poems, notice how several writers can begin with similar situations yet make unlike choices about scale, chronology, voice, and closure. Those differences reveal the form's artistic range more clearly than one isolated example can.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and narrative method continually reshape each other. An event-centered poem gives themes a before and an after: affection can be tested, fear can alter a decision, and memory can revise what once seemed settled. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not statistical claims about which subjects are most popular.
- Family memory: Recalled meals, departures, inheritances, and arguments allow a present-day speaker to revisit an earlier self. The gap between what happened and what is now understood can generate tenderness, resentment, unreliability, or reconciliation.
- Journeys and crossings: Movement through a landscape supplies visible progression while the traveler undergoes an inward change. Delays, wrong turns, companions, and thresholds can make physical distance carry moral or emotional consequence.
- Loss and aftermath: Rather than naming grief abstractly, a poem can follow the practical actions surrounding absence. Handling an object, entering an altered room, or repeating an old routine lets emotion emerge through consequence and changed perception.
- Conflict and difficult choices: Arguments, betrayals, rescues, refusals, and divided loyalties create immediate pressure. They work especially well when the poem allows action to reveal values instead of pausing to state a lesson.
- Mystery and the uncanny: Unexplained sounds, uncertain encounters, dreams, or disputed memories benefit from controlled disclosure. A narrator can guide readers toward one interpretation while imagery and tone quietly suggest another.
- Work and ordinary ritual: A shift, repair, lesson, harvest, meal, or daily route can become dramatic when routine is interrupted. Familiar procedures also provide a stable pattern against which one small deviation feels momentous.
- Growth and transformation: First responsibilities, changing friendships, failures, and discoveries offer a clear contrast between an earlier and later understanding. Compression lets the poet focus on the few episodes that make the transformation believable.
As you read the community poems, compare how different writers transform related themes through narrator, scale, sensory focus, and ending. Two poets may address the same kind of loss or journey yet leave the reader with entirely different emotional knowledge.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between forward motion and sustained attention. A story asks the reader to proceed, but a poem asks the reader to hear, see, and reconsider each charged unit of language. Memorable work does not solve this tension by choosing one side. Instead, its sound, imagery, syntax, and lineation become the means by which the event is experienced. A pause carries a character's reluctance; a repeated sound tightens dread; an image returns because circumstances have altered what it signifies.
Structure feels necessary when the order and duration of passages create meaning. A poet may devote several stanzas to one gesture and cross years in a line because the gesture contains the true crisis. A shift in speaker, time, or setting succeeds when it changes the reader's moral or emotional position. Even an elaborate rhyme or recurring pattern earns its place only if it affects expectation-perhaps making events feel inevitable, ceremonial, comic, obsessive, or trapped. When patterning operates independently of the subject, the poem may remain recognizable yet feel mechanically assembled.
Editors and attentive readers notice the quality of causation. This does not mean every action requires explicit explanation; it means discoveries, reversals, and emotional turns arise from evidence the poem has prepared. Common weaknesses include predictable sequencing, exposition that tells readers what a scene already shows, forced language used to maintain a sound pattern, and surprise endings unsupported by earlier detail. Another danger is insufficient development: the poet may announce a dramatic event but provide too little sensory or psychological experience for its consequences to register. At the opposite extreme, over-explanation can close every interpretive space and reduce characters to examples of a stated message.
Individuality remains visible through selection. Writers facing comparable material will notice different objects, sympathize with different witnesses, and choose different moments as the true beginning or ending. One voice may be candid, another evasive; one may find meaning in action, another in what cannot be recovered. Browse the poems in this collection with those decisions in mind. Comparing multiple community poems develops discernment because quality becomes more than adherence to a shared category: it becomes the felt coherence among event, voice, pacing, image, sound, and consequence.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on your sense of what the form can accomplish. Compare how poets handle beginnings, time shifts, dramatic scenes, narrators, recurring images, and final revelations. A thoughtful comment might identify where tension sharpened, which detail made a character vivid, or how an ending changed your view of the event.
Then try shaping an event of your own into a poem and publish it on PoetrySoup. Let the collection serve not as a template to copy but as a conversation about how stories change when every pause, sound, image, and line ending matters.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 10139 poems, providing a broad field for reading individual works and comparing interpretations. Within a collection of this size, visitors can examine different choices of narrator, scale, chronology, pacing, imagery, and closure. Some poets may follow familiar conventions closely, while others may adapt or challenge them. Reading across several entries offers a more useful perspective than treating any single poem as the only possible model.
Narrative Categories
Read wonderful narrative poetry on the following sub-topics:
christmas, 4th grade, funny, high school, kids, life, middle school, nature, rhyme, 3rd grade,
and more.
Definition | What is Narrative 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.