“a heartbeat pulsating as living light
free from each and every limitation
I Am that dwelling in unbound delight
the source wherefrom arises creation”
My compass is set:
Forward alignmed by faith through grace.
I do not control life’s challenges,
but I command my response.
I am that I live for my purpose,
not for the world’s praise.
I do not bend;
I do not break;
I do not look back.
I am that, I am of a human sponge,
Whom listens, observers and absorbs lifes lessons and learn from its mistakes!
For this is my creed!
You came into my life without a sound, with out a word.
I was speechless
Butterfly speeding around, you gave me footprints in my heart.
You stepped in , never asked a word, you spoke, never thre out a hand to that on-broken heart, that you left foot-prints all n over.
You came into my life with a broken heart, you was sinking and you was pulling both hearts withbwith both foot prints ..
You gave me foot prints all over my heart and never cared enough to let go, and save me !!!
Why ?? I'll never know or understand why ?? You came into my life and lifted foot prints all over mybheart.
.
he
fluster'd
fem'nine front
flower'n
hiz think
ink
'magine
hiz silent
think
'pon yourn visit
illiterate
'magine
thuh bottle'd
purty
not one bud'z burst
glister
lock
hmm
m-m
:}
You climb my branches
each fall in search of
something sweet.
With a twist and a snap,
you claim your prize—
a juicy ruby-red apple.
I gladly give you
my sweet fruit,
a treat I offer others.
The round dance of the world is a cry from bottomless years.
Celestial waves grant me beautiful music.
In a flash the years pass, destinies drift away.
A star sparkles at the heart of time — it is magic.
Wave after wave, surging, the oceans break the rocks.
Listening to your voice, the sound of your steps, a part of me.
I feel taller; I see you again playing — it is the past.
Years are never long enough; we always run after what?
The day will come when I leave quietly, with nothing,
but a soul loaded with so much — an encyclopedia.
Above all, to share, to keep nothing, to serve what is good.
On that day, the painter of words will remain a link to life.
Poet of a time, all the strength of the wind licks my sail.
My son, the song of love flows in me — it is for you.
A glimmer in the sky carries my heart, a dust of stars.
And my brightness that night, up there, will shine only for you.
— Joël Charvillat
If I had to describe her persona in one word,
It would be real,
The romantic kind of real,
Not the real that says,
What you see is what you get.
The real that begets unconditional Love,
The often frustrating kind of real,
That is genuinely caring,
But independent to a point that takes,
A heap of non-interference,
A strict adherence,
To Unconditional Love being the only point of
reference,
One that asks for patience,
And a total lack of offence.
The kind of independence,
That a shovel will not budge,
With only time able to give her that nudge,
Which is needed to open her eyes to,
What unconditional Love can do,
To lighten her burden.
And make her see independence in a new light.
An independence though still intact,
Less exact,
Open to saying the occasional yes,
When help from those with unconditional love in their hearts,
Is offered in a way that is full of tact.
And empty of tacks,
That in the past has caused her to have panic attacks.
D: "I was never afraid of people. I usually go out with them because I love people and everybody else. I love all things around me who are kind to me. And whenever they swim, sing, dance or play I do the same thing with them. "
Cs: "We and you belong to different breeds although we are housed in one ventilated area. Most of us think you are a Stoic!"
D: "I am not a Stoic. I'm a duck...
Quack!"
I am poetry because the heat of my dance
brings an aroma that hugs you as long as you want
I sit in the perfect spaces
Bringing light to everything precious
If you can’t stop to smell the roses
I can be the friendly reminder, of,
How soft life can be in the midst of the hard
Come back to earth
The nightmare is only the beginning of the dream
I am poetry because I calm the storm
I am the moon in the dark
Love sparks from me
And Love conquers all
My smoke carries all the feelings you need to let go of
Watch how I make the shadows of love dance
You watch me and then cut in
Like a quiet rainwater drying it tears
The end
I can’t wait for light to spark this two step again
p.s. don’t forget to blow out the candle…
.
yet edvard i hear'd
haunts
thinks
wide (i hear'd)
hiz wake
tap tap
tap'n
'til
'twixt thar
them
werdz
tap
The Greenbrier's Tenacity
I am the root that refuses the drought. I am the vine that denies the clean edge of the saw. You curse my thorns and call me wilderness, but I am simply the will to live, unbound.
My stems are leather, supple and sharp. They climb without asking, weaving through the neat, clean rows, a dense, insistent, complicated love. I am the silent truth in the heart of the manicured yard: What is essential finds a way to endure.
My leaves are heart-shaped, glossy, and deep green, a constant, quiet declaration of presence. I do not wait for the season's approval; I am here, always, holding the space.
The root is the law: thick, stubborn, and vast. It is an anchor against the shifting soil, holding the memory of every rain and every hunger. You may cut me back to the bare earth, but the life force is only driven deeper.
When you finally surrender to my persistence, you will find the small, dark, blue-black cluster of berries. They are the food of the deep winter, a gift of unhurried survival.
I am the Greenbrier, the tough, thorny truth. I teach you that to cling is to conquer, and that the deepest strength is found in the refusal to rest.
I took a walk around the sphere
Just to break them spells
I spoke with mother nature
Then she gave me her words
Words of blessings
Saying; as you want it do it and so be it.
I took a flight to the sky
So I'll be so fly
I spoke with the father sun
Then he gave me his words
Words of inspiration
Saying; shine unapologetically.
Then I took a walk within
Just to speak with me
So I can pick up my spirit from within
The he in me said;
When you conquer your mind
You've opened the world of possibilities
Make sure you put into use your abilities
With your capability you'll reign in the world of possibilities.
I step onto my departure from the dock
to embark on a voyage of the amygdala.
Here lies a treasure trove of motion.
The gangway moves slowly,
no suitcases or fare stubs,
only our passports—
those little books of identity
that grant us entry.
Then we all separate into the chambers
of the left and right atriums.
We check in at the front desk
like a queue of traffic.
Murmurs from fellow passengers drown out
the gratuities,
as our steward paces the hallway
with a duty-free smile.
At last, we reach the bridge,
suspended between the bow and stern.
All my ‘what ifs’ and ‘buts’
rising up and thrown overboard
like drifting flotsam.
All my life, I witnessed many times,
People walked into my life,
Quickly we shared our soul and mind,
Then, for one reason or another
They eventually disappeared.
Some abruptly and left me with wonder,
Some with excuses and left without a trace.
Others just not interested and gone for ever.
It took me almost one year,
To let BB goes without a closure.
The way JC come and leave,
Triggered me emotionally upset.
JN on the other hand,
This was the second time,
She repeatedly made false promises,
Despite I asked her to focus.
Make no mistakes nor errors.
She just did not listen,
Bad things kept on happened,
Led me to make decision,
Our friendship must end.
It was quite ashamed,
The way the relationships came and went.
Vive la différence
couples complement each other
balancing the scales
one will play the jokester
clown and storyteller
the other acts as sidekick
filling in if there are gaps
they juggle and finesse their roles
managing an equilibrium
thus the introvert and extrovert
weave their life in harmony
AP: Honorable Mention 2025
Man’s path of least resistance
is described as destiny.
The outcome predetermined,
as a river running to the sea.
Introduction
The first pleasure of reading persona poems together is the repeated moment when a voice becomes believable enough to borrow the room. Each poem offers a double encounter: the speaker presents a version of reality, while the poet arranges clues that may confirm, complicate, or quietly contradict that version. The reader listens not only for what is said, but also for what the adopted voice cannot admit, does not understand, or deliberately leaves out.
As you browse the community poems, you may encounter intimate confession, comic boasting, accusation, testimony, prayer, self-defense, or meditative witness. Some speakers may sound expansive and theatrical; others may reveal themselves through restraint, fractured memory, specialized vocabulary, or a single recurring image. The most rewarding comparisons often arise between poets who choose similar kinds of speakers but create entirely different degrees of sympathy, reliability, distance, and dramatic pressure.
Reading beyond the first example reveals how much depends on artistic decision rather than premise alone. An unusual speaker can initially attract attention, but sustained interest comes from a convincing inner logic: what this consciousness notices, values, fears, misunderstands, and wants. Compare several poets' approaches to see how diction, pacing, imagery, silence, and closure make a voice feel inhabited rather than merely announced. A collection also lets readers notice the productive tension between poet and speaker-the space in which irony, empathy, critique, humor, and emotional surprise can develop.
Reading Guide
A persona poem asks for alert listening. The speaker's language is evidence: every word may disclose education, desire, status, temperament, physical condition, historical setting, or a hidden relationship. At the same time, the poet may expect readers to understand more than the speaker does. As you read the community poems, avoid judging only whether a character sounds vivid. Consider how the entire poem constructs a mind under pressure and how carefully it manages the distance between that mind, the poet, and the reader.
- Listen for a social and emotional fingerprint. Notice characteristic nouns, sentence shapes, idioms, evasions, and levels of formality. These choices should suggest habits of thought, not simply decorate the speaker. When comparing poems, ask: could this language belong only to this consciousness, or could almost any speaker say it?
- Track the boundaries of knowledge. A convincing speaker has a particular field of awareness and may misread events outside it. Those limits create credibility and sometimes dramatic irony. Ask what each speaker knows, assumes, forgets, or cannot perceive-and whether the poem remains faithful to those boundaries.
- Identify the implied listener. A confession to a stranger differs from an appeal to a child, rival, judge, absent lover, or silent object. The listener influences what is emphasized and concealed. Ask whom the speaker needs to persuade and why the speech must happen now.
- Examine image ownership. Strong imagery grows from the speaker's environment, body, work, memories, and values. A sailor, monarch, machine, and abandoned house would not naturally organize experience through identical comparisons. Which images reveal character rather than merely displaying the poet's ingenuity?
- Notice the gap between tone and revelation. Calm speech may contain menace; comedy may shelter grief; certainty may expose insecurity. Compare how different writers let tone support or undermine a speaker's claims. What does the reader learn that the speaker may not intend to reveal?
- Follow breath, sound, and pacing. Long accumulating sentences can suggest authority, obsession, or panic, while clipped lines may imply control, fear, damage, or guardedness. Repetition can become ritual, insistence, or self-deception. Ask whether the poem's movement sounds like this speaker thinking in real time.
- Test the final disclosure. Effective endings often alter the meaning of earlier language without explaining the speaker completely. Look for a changed relationship, sharpened contradiction, consequential silence, or final image. Does the ending deepen the voice, or merely summarize its message?
Read several poems with one of these questions in mind, then return with another. Comparison makes the craft visible without reducing the voices to a checklist.
Writing Tips
Begin with pressure rather than costume. An unusual identity, occupation, era, creature, or object may supply an appealing premise, but the poem needs a reason for speech. Ask what the speaker wants from an implied listener, what has become impossible to keep silent, and what might be lost through disclosure. That dramatic need will help you decide what the voice notices and how the poem should move.
- Choose a perspective that changes the subject. The most useful persona is not simply a novel camera angle. It should reveal tensions unavailable through your ordinary speaking voice. Select material in which the adopted consciousness can misunderstand, resist, reinterpret, or embody the central conflict.
- Build a private vocabulary. Gather verbs, textures, objects, measurements, rituals, and metaphors that belong to the speaker's world. Use them selectively. A beginner often proves the premise by repeatedly naming obvious identity markers; stronger drafts let identity emerge through patterns of attention.
- Establish limits as carefully as abilities. Decide what the speaker cannot know, cannot sense, refuses to remember, or lacks language to express. For historical or culturally distant perspectives, research can prevent vague imitation, but factual detail alone does not create inward credibility. Avoid accents, borrowed suffering, and stereotypes used as shortcuts to character.
- Give the speech a relationship. Even when the listener is never named, imagine one. Is the speaker seducing, warning, mourning, bargaining, instructing, or defending a reputation? A clear relational purpose gives the poem momentum and prevents it from becoming a static character sketch.
- Let freedom create responsibility. Because no predetermined sonic shell has to carry the voice, every formal choice becomes character evidence. Stanza length, syntax, repetition, and white space should answer the speaker's emotional condition. Do not mistake a recognizable premise for sufficient form, or add mannerisms merely to keep reminding readers who is speaking.
- Shape sound from body and temperament. Consider how this speaker breathes and what kinds of sounds suit that breath. Dense consonants may create resistance; open vowels may enlarge grief or wonder; recurring phrases may suggest ritual or fixation. Read aloud to hear when musical language belongs more to the poet than to the persona.
- Control pacing through disclosure. Decide when the reader receives context, motive, contradiction, and consequence. Withholding everything creates confusion, while explaining everything removes discovery. Line breaks and stanza turns can delay a revealing word, interrupt self-assurance, or make a silence emotionally active.
- Make imagery arise from perception. Before choosing a comparison, ask whether the speaker would possess the experience needed to make it. Nonhuman speakers become convincing not when they behave exactly like humans, but when their physical limits and sensory world reshape familiar emotions.
- End beyond the premise. Avoid closing with a moral, identity announcement, or explanation of what the voice represents. Seek a final action, image, reversal, or omission that exposes a cost. The ending should leave the speaker more fully encountered, though not necessarily fully understood.
During revision, mark every phrase that exists mainly to explain the character and test whether action, image, or syntax can carry that information instead. Then read the draft aloud twice: once as a performer pursuing the speaker's immediate desire, and once as a skeptical listener tracking contradictions. If the voice remains distinct after obvious labels are removed, the poem has likely moved from impersonation toward presence.
Interesting Facts
- A speaker need not be identified immediately. Delaying identity can create productive mystery if diction, sensory limits, and circumstance provide fair clues. The reveal then changes the meaning of earlier details rather than functioning as a detachable trick.
- Credibility and honesty are different achievements. A voice can be internally convincing while offering a distorted account. This gap permits dramatic irony: readers may recognize jealousy, fear, guilt, or self-deception before the speaker can name it.
- Nonhuman voices are strengthened by constraint. Simply giving an object or animal human opinions can flatten the imaginative opportunity. Attention to duration, mobility, scale, material, sensation, or dependence can produce a genuinely altered way of perceiving.
- Silence can characterize as strongly as speech. Missing names, avoided memories, abrupt transitions, and unanswered questions show where the speaker's control weakens. In this form, omission may be psychological evidence rather than an empty gap.
- Length changes the burden of voice. A brief poem can preserve mystery through a concentrated utterance, while a longer poem must develop the consciousness through shifts in memory, strategy, tone, or relation. Mere continuation rarely substitutes for development.
- Several personas can create a contested truth. In a sequence, different voices may interpret the same event without an authoritative narrator settling the dispute. Repeated images can gather altered meanings as they pass from one consciousness to another.
- Performance is an interpretive test. Pace, pause, emphasis, and vocal posture can reveal whether a line sounds lived or literary. As you browse the poems in this collection, imagine how each speaker would occupy a room and what would change if the poem were heard aloud.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and persona are inseparable because the chosen consciousness determines what can be noticed, desired, denied, or misunderstood. The subjects below are literary possibilities, not a statistical ranking. Each becomes especially fertile when the speaker's position creates a meaningful angle on the experience.
- Memory and witness. A survivor, heirloom, building, photograph, or landscape can hold traces that other characters overlook. Such speakers make memory selective and contested: what they preserve may be as important as what they cannot recover.
- Power and self-justification. Rulers, officials, parents, employers, captors, or charismatic leaders can disclose authority while trying to defend it. The form allows confidence and moral blindness to occupy the same speech, inviting readers to evaluate claims without a separate narrator.
- Grief, absence, and unfinished address. Speaking to someone unavailable intensifies the implied-listener dynamic. A persona may bargain with silence, revise a shared past, or confess what could not be said earlier, giving emotional pressure to every act of address.
- Labor and overlooked expertise. A worker's tools, routines, physical knowledge, and specialized vocabulary can shape the poem's images and rhythms. This perspective can reveal how identity is formed by repeated tasks, service, risk, pride, or invisibility.
- Aging, change, and bodily limitation. A speaker confronting altered strength, appearance, memory, or usefulness can make time tangible. An embodied voice also prevents the theme from becoming abstract by grounding it in movement, sensation, and daily negotiation.
- Place and environmental change. A river, field, street, house, or weathered structure can register human time against another scale. The challenge is to develop a distinctive sensory logic rather than merely using the speaker as a mouthpiece for a predetermined message.
- Myth, history, and inherited stories. A marginal figure or familiar character may question the account attached to them. The poem can explore who controls a narrative, but it becomes most compelling when the speaker possesses desires beyond correcting the record.
As you read the community poems, compare treatments of related themes. Notice how changes in listener, knowledge, tone, and imagery can transform similar material into radically different emotional encounters.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between imaginative intimacy and meaningful otherness. The poet must enter a consciousness closely enough to make its speech feel urgent, yet preserve enough distance for that consciousness to remain more than a disguised version of the poet. Too little intimacy produces a puppet assembled from external traits. Too little distance produces an ordinary lyric wearing a name tag. Memorable work sustains both forces: the speaker feels inwardly alive, while the poem remains aware that every perspective has limits.
In strong examples, structure becomes the behavior of a mind. A recursive stanza pattern may enact obsession; a widening sentence may imitate accumulating confidence; interrupted lines may register fear, damage, or resistance. Repetition can sound ceremonial in one voice and defensive in another. The arrangement feels necessary when the poem's pacing, syntax, sounds, and silences all emerge from the speaker's situation. Editors notice when an image does several jobs at once-locating the speaker's world, disclosing temperament, and advancing the dramatic pressure-rather than serving as decorative description.
Recognizability alone is a low threshold. Predictable poems often give a speaker only the observations readers expect from the premise. Forced archaism, exaggerated accent, conspicuous jargon, or repeated catchphrases can substitute theatrical signals for developed consciousness. Another common weakness is over-explanation: the poem labels motives, supplies background, and interprets every contradiction before readers can participate. The opposite problem is insufficient development, in which an intriguing voice speaks without wanting anything, encountering resistance, changing strategy, or reaching a consequential discovery. Mechanical stanza patterns can further flatten the voice if every unit delivers information with identical weight.
Individuality survives shared conventions through selection and pressure. Two poets may adopt comparable speakers, yet one may emphasize sensory restriction while another builds around an implied accusation; one may create sympathy through humor while another uses controlled self-deception. The poet's artistry appears not through stepping outside the persona to explain, but through deciding which details enter, where the voice hesitates, and how much the reader is trusted to infer. Comparing multiple community poems sharpens judgment because quality becomes visible across alternatives. Readers begin to distinguish novelty of premise from depth of realization, verbal display from character-bearing sound, and a clever ending from one that makes the entire utterance newly resonant.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on what the form can do. Compare how different writers establish a speaker's private vocabulary, implied listener, blind spots, and moment of pressure. A thoughtful comment might identify a revealing image, a persuasive turn in tone, or a silence that changed your understanding of the voice.
Then try constructing a speaker whose perspective genuinely transforms the material. Read the draft aloud, revise what sounds borrowed or over-explained, and consider publishing the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can join an ongoing conversation in which each new voice gives readers another way to test the possibilities of persona.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 423 poems, offering ample opportunity to compare how writers build distinct voices, dramatic situations, and degrees of distance between speaker and reader. Some poets may follow familiar conventions closely, while others adapt or challenge expectations through unusual perspectives, shifting tones, or experimental structures. Reading across the collection helps reveal how many artistic decisions can grow from the same broad approach.
Persona Categories
Definition | What is Persona 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
dramatic monologue, an existence, anima, article, being, body, character, coconscious, collective unconscious, conscience, conscious self, creature, critter, death instinct, ego, ego ideal, ego-id conflict, entelechy, entity, ethical self, exterior, facade, face, foreconscio dramatic monologue, an existence, anima, article, being, body, character, coconscious, collective unconscious, conscience, conscious self, creature, critter, death instinct, ego, ego ideal, ego-id conflict, entelechy, entity, ethical self, exterior, facade, face, foreconscio