I fondly recall lovely Spring mornings!
Breakfast was light, cup of fresh brewed
coffee, enjoyed on our airy back porch --
You suggested lunch, why not straight from
the garden? We tasted, spoke of the advantage
of no pesticides while gathering greens and
fruits. Dinner was with fine wine at a local
Italian restaurant we often frequented.
The chief’s daughter played on her violin
our favorite, Meditation from Thais --
Life was no less complicated but easier
to navigate, with pilot and co-pilot taking
turns. Maybe Heifetz and Massenet in Heaven?
My mother’s Eggplant Parmesan!? Dad said he
would never make it. Like to think we all
eventually do? Put in a good word for me.
See you soon.
I have neither read nor heard
that the Scots occupied the lands of others,
or dropped bombs on schools, hospitals, and places of worship,
or killed children, women, and doctors of various nationalities.
Keats fiancée Fanny Brawne
This love,unconsummated,is left
upon our lips.in poems few,
sweet words of passion,bereft-
contentment,neither knew
Bright Star -Story of Fanny Brawne&John Keats see the movie for more
Like himself,just five feet tall
but Fanny was his all 'n all,
Until death's forboding ,made it's call;
Just letters left for us to hear,
They cannot but ,bring forth a tear
A tribute to John Keats (the poet) and his sweetheart Fanny Brawne
and the courtship trgically ended by John's too early death.
Here is an extract from one of his letters to Fanny-
Pillowed upon my fair-love,ripening breast
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall
Awake forever in a sweet unrest
Still,still to hear her tender breath
Keats A Song about myself
John Keats qualified as a surgeon apothecary
before concocting his poetry
He also wrote ballads & odes
but sonnets were his favourite mode
my version of Keats famous lyric for children
There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he
For nothing would he do
but scribble poetry:
He took
up his pen
again&again
Each thought
was caught
one after
the other
on his
folio cover
Indoors
or out
&never
a doubt
into his head
ideas did shout
Why was
this so
No-one
did know
For like Topsy
they just
seemed
to grow!
In our poetic firmanent
Keats is a brightest star;
he died,he thought a failure-
history judges otherwise,
true poetics ,never dies
If we can experience it, it is already a material thought-part of God. The permanent of all substance. God doesn't simply construct (what basic man understandably childlike reasons) -- He is builder of everything (all of His own essence-parts) (purified when in balance) (perfect in manifestation when blossomed expression) -- God is infinite existence, the purpose of Love to be lived outright eternally. Everything He is, He wants us to be, even greater for He is also all potential unlimited.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So few understand the bible, and the true nature of being. God lives, breathes, feels with and through His creation (including us) -- Free Will allows us to separate from Him consciously...but it is an illusion. True separation is impossible. All is made of God Substance (His Body). Nothing exists outside of God. He is form and being. In Him knowledge of all Good and Evil. We pick and choose, Law the Redeemer. Grace and Love the patience. When in balance...there is only love.
Ex-medical student Francis Thompson
off to Lords he went along
Writing of cricket in verse
producing a poem accurate but terse
Across the alfalfa field hid that creek, so simple yet so complex.
The Nebraskan wind hummed country melodies over its weeds and blossoms as my Labrador, Sandy, and I strode towards its mystical plainness.
She stopped and sniffed the ground before diving into Nameless' gray current, her golden body relishing the warm summer water.
Her head graced the surface like a canine swan as her strong legs paddled through the nameless depth. Birds tweeted their greetings to us as Nature's orchestra labored in harmony.
Sandy climbed back upon the creek's bank before she eyed me with a smile. I chuckled as I told her that no, I couldn't swim.
She is now buried under a majestic tree near the nameless creek. Illness stole my sweet dog from my world, but never from my heart. This creek had no name, yet memories burned themselves inside its muddy water.
Anger-fueled words flare out of his mouth
like blue flames
I can feel the energy darken and turn cold
I sit silently
keeping my eyes locked downward,
absorbing every atom of hatred
that forms the sharp sounds being emitted.
I try not to show how uncomfortable I am
instead, I stare at the hypnotic,
damaging radiation waves
bellowing invisibly from the light of my phone screen,
pretending not to be affected by the unnecessary
vulgarities spouting from his ego.
in less than an instant,
the vibes go from comfortably chill
to anxiously wishing I was anywhere
but in this passenger seat.
every sentence carves a new scar
into my already damaged soul
as my brain categorizes each word
where it rightfully belongs.
I’m grateful for my oversized sunglasses
that hide my wincing eyes—
until I catch him looking sideways at me.
I solemnly mutter something about it being rush hour,
trying to become as small as my body will let me be.
I hope it seems like I’m too engulfed
in whatever stupid game I'm playing
to notice the short-fused flip-outs
that now happen every single time
we're in the car.
Love's Philosophy a double quatrain in two stanza by Percy Bysshe Shelley is summed up in the eternal personal plea of his line 'Nothing in the world is single' & he declaims it should not be he
Poet Percy a bit of a rebel was he as his tragic bio truth to tell ,drowning in his boat 'Ariel'.
GEORGE ELIOT
An eliot is an epigram form I labelled in honour of George Eliot the English novelist/poet,
inspired by an example in Chap 8 of her book Daniel Deronda.Here is her epigram should you
wish to try one for yourself
What name doth Joy most borrow
when life is fair ?
Tomorrow !
What name does best fit sorrow
In young despair?
Tomorrow !
A talent
that outlived
passing fame-
hidden beneath
her lover's name.
&here is my 'ELIOT'
What tune does youth most play
when future's biding ?
Today !
What wisdom does age convey
when time is passing ?
Today !
Everyone wants a piece of me…
that’s what a large part of life
is. Wife, children, friends and
neighbors – little love bites for
attention~ the cats. And what
matters most, at the end of a
day, a life? – instead of left whole
I would rather have been fondly
portioned out, a good taste left on the sampling
palates of acquaintances. Relationships are
more triangles than circles...a
few pointed edges, pricked as
we navigate attractions. In my geometries
at the center real hearts....
Squares not pointed enough,
and circles rather boring.
Pieces are portions and portions
once an entire pie. Apples,
cinnamon and lots of brown sugar --
what the heck! Sweets are great
preservatives…. Maybe in charge
of bakeries my destiny if flavorful
decadence occasionally allowed in
the Here-after? I mean, if castles
and pavement of gold, why not pastries?
Do dentists ever make it to heaven?
Birth brings joy to the mother, the father, and the family — an innocent newborn, pure by nature and instinct.
Death, however, in fact, completely different! To/for poeple death of a great person brings deep sorrow, whereas the death of a vile, evil, rotten is a great mercy and a source of immense joy!
What did you do? What did you take? What did you give? How did you spend your life? How did you acquire your wealth, and how did you spend it? Were you a human being or a devil? For/to you, this is the very heart and essence of life!
Your hairstyle, skin color, place and ethnicity are of no value.
Core, heart, mind, soul. That is it all!
CHRISTINA R
Christina Rossetti
come by
come buy
eagerly lap
so exotic
this
drizzling
juice
crushed
fruit
sweet to the tongue
sound to he eye
come by
come buy
superbundant
innocence
in
abundance
aplenty
come by
come buy
jouissance
succulent
fruit
crushed
pulpy
to whet
your appetite
let
your
imagination
run
wild
effusive
prelapsarian
with
delicious desire
come by
come buy
take it
as
it
comes
Without exaggeration or pretense, I have been writing poetry—almost every day and night—for over ten years; I have penned at least 3,650 pieces or poems. I am not particularly concerned with what is written about my work, except when the commentary comes from poets I know well or personally.
I would advise any poet not to pay too much attention to what is written about their poetry—whether praise or criticism—unless it comes from poets whose caliber matches or exceeds their own.
All the best.
A PRAYER TO NOWHERE
The horizon
Pulled forward and above me
Like a morgue's white sheet
Rain began to fall
Someone, somewhere
Opened a window in the clouds
And began to call
My will, take me there
Before time grows tired of my presence
Rain struck my window
Blurring the outside world
Colored shapes moved about
I pressed my face against the cold glass
Not wanting to return
Ahead was nothing more than a cell
A dead man walking
Unchaperoned
A final mile
An abbreviated world
The half-life of man
The monitor came to life
Just another window
To another nothing world
Words, numbers, pictures
And that thin line between truth and lies
Rain replaced by the tapping of keys
Concern measured in a sentence
Apathy in words
Recorded for eternity
A Prayer to nowhere
I searched for a rainstorm
What was promised to women was a lie
That men had already been fooled by
I pressed my face against the warm glass
And found truth in deception
Introduction
The pleasure of reading prose on a poetry collection page begins with a productive uncertainty: a familiar-looking paragraph may unfold as narrative, confession, meditation, character study, argument, dream, or densely musical description. Without conspicuous lineation directing every pause, the sentence must carry unusual responsibility. Its clauses regulate breath, its punctuation controls hesitation, and its movement determines when an image arrives or an emotion changes pressure.
As you read the community poems, expect considerable variation in scale and intention. One writer may concentrate on a single remembered gesture, while another develops a scene, a comic voice, a letter-like address, or a sequence of reflections. Some pieces may favor direct storytelling; others may heighten repetition, figurative language, or sonic patterning. Not every submission will interpret the category in precisely the same way, and that variation gives readers an opportunity to consider where prose becomes especially charged, memorable, or lyrical.
An isolated example can display one successful approach, but a collection reveals the range of available decisions. Compare how several poets begin, how long they remain within one moment, and how they move between image and explanation. Notice which pieces make paragraph shape feel spacious, intimate, urgent, or claustrophobic. Reading beyond the first example also sharpens judgment: similarities reveal shared possibilities, while differences show how strongly voice, syntax, pacing, and selection can distinguish one writer from another.
Reading Guide
Approach each piece first as an experience rather than as a test of category. The prose surface can encourage fast, informational reading, but the most rewarding work often asks for slower attention. Sentences and paragraphs may be doing work that lineation performs elsewhere: organizing breath, delaying disclosure, accumulating detail, and creating turns. When comparing community poems, observe not only what each writer says but how the movement of thought has been shaped.
- The opening contract: Notice whether the first sentence offers a scene, voice, question, claim, or disturbance. What expectation does it establish, and does the rest of the piece deepen or productively overturn that expectation?
- Sentence pressure: Track where clauses lengthen, contract, interrupt one another, or arrive in fragments. Does the syntax enact calm reflection, breathless urgency, confusion, intimacy, or control more effectively than the subject alone could?
- Paragraph movement: Treat each paragraph break as a meaningful threshold. Does it signal a change in time, speaker, emotional temperature, or perspective? Compare whether other poets use paragraphs as scenes, stages of thought, or deliberate silences.
- Sound beneath the surface: Listen for recurring consonants, vowels, internal echoes, and repeated phrases. Do these patterns quietly unify the writing, or do they become so prominent that they compete with the natural authority of the voice?
- Image and explanation: Mark places where concrete detail gives way to interpretation. Does the writer trust an object, gesture, setting, or sensory impression to carry meaning, or explain an emotion before the image has gathered force?
- Narrative distance: Ask how close the voice stands to the event. Is the speaker reliving, observing, confessing, inventing, or reconsidering? How does that distance affect credibility and emotional intensity?
- The final resonance: Notice whether the ending resolves an action, returns to an image, changes the meaning of an earlier sentence, or deliberately leaves pressure unresolved. What remains active in the reader after the final punctuation?
Browse several poems with one of these elements in mind, then reread your favorites aloud. Comparison makes subtle differences in timing, tonal control, and sentence music easier to hear.
Writing Tips
Begin a prose draft by finding movement rather than merely finding a topic. A useful subject contains change: a memory becomes less certain, an ordinary object gathers emotional weight, a speaker revises a judgment, or a scene exposes something previously concealed. The form offers substantial freedom, but that freedom places greater pressure on selection and sentence design. A paragraph-shaped draft is not automatically finished simply because it occupies the page convincingly.
- Choose material that benefits from continuity: Consider experiences in which thought, observation, and action need to flow into one another. A sustained recollection, interior monologue, encounter, or unfolding description can gain force when the reader is carried forward without frequent visual interruption.
- Establish a center of gravity: Decide what image, question, conflict, or emotional contradiction holds the piece together. Freedom can encourage digression; a strong center allows associative movement without making the draft feel accidental.
- Build paragraphs as units of discovery: Give each paragraph a task beyond containing sentences. One might establish the physical world, another complicate the speaker's understanding, and another alter the emotional stakes. Break a paragraph when the mind or scene genuinely turns, not merely when the block looks long.
- Vary sentence architecture purposefully: Long sentences can accumulate impressions, imitate obsession, or postpone a difficult recognition. Short sentences can interrupt that flow with certainty, shock, or refusal. Repeatedly using the same length and structure often produces monotony rather than coherence.
- Compose for the ear without forcing ornament: Use internal echoes, consonant clusters, vowel patterns, and recurring key words to create texture. Obvious rhyme or heavily decorated phrasing can sound imposed if the speaker's situation does not support it. Read aloud to locate both music and strain.
- Let images perform intellectual work: Choose details that affect the speaker's understanding, not details included solely for prettiness. An image becomes structurally valuable when it returns altered, contradicts a claim, or makes an abstract emotion physically apprehensible.
- Protect the voice from over-explanation: Beginners often narrate an event and then tell the reader exactly what it means. Test whether a gesture, omission, tonal shift, or charged object can communicate part of that meaning more powerfully. Direct explanation is useful when it advances thought rather than repeats evidence.
- Earn the ending: Avoid attaching a generalized moral or dramatic declaration that the preceding language has not prepared. The final sentence may narrow, open outward, echo the beginning, or introduce a revealing contradiction, but it should change the pressure of what came before.
During revision, print or display the draft as a continuous reading experience and mark every place where attention weakens. Tighten redundant explanation, replace interchangeable images, and vary syntax where the rhythm becomes mechanical. Then read the piece aloud twice: once at a conversational pace and once slowly enough to hear every punctuation choice. The stronger version will preserve natural authority while making each pause, sound, paragraph shift, and final cadence feel intentional.
Interesting Facts
- A familiar page shape can conceal intricate timing. Readers may initially move through a paragraph as ordinary discourse, so a carefully delayed verb, interrupted clause, or sudden short sentence can produce an unusually strong surprise.
- Paragraph breaks can function as both silence and argument. The space between blocks may mark elapsed time, a withheld response, or a change in consciousness. Two writers can use the same visual separation to create either calm reflection or emotional rupture.
- Length changes psychological pressure. A single compact block may feel concentrated, secretive, or claustrophobic, while several paragraphs can permit narrative development and reconsideration. Neither effect follows automatically; sentence rhythm determines how the space is experienced.
- Repetition can seem less announced than it does in a refrain. Because recurring language is embedded within sentences, readers may absorb its pattern before consciously identifying it. That delayed recognition can make a repeated word feel obsessive, haunting, comic, or inevitable.
- The plainest sentence may carry the greatest weight. After a passage rich in imagery or syntactic expansion, an unadorned statement can restore emotional credibility and create contrast. Heightened language often becomes more effective when it has something restrained to press against.
- Side-by-side reading exposes hidden architecture. Browse the poems in this collection and compare how writers distribute scene, reflection, dialogue, description, and silence. The shared prose surface makes differences in voice and pacing especially visible.
Popular Themes
Subject matter changes how prose movement is felt. A reflective theme may welcome long, unfolding sentences, while danger or comedy may benefit from abrupt turns and tightly controlled timing. The subjects below are literary possibilities rather than a statistical popularity ranking; each becomes effective only when its language and structure support its emotional demands.
- Memory and family: Prose can follow the mind as it moves between present observation and remembered detail. Ordinary objects, repeated sayings, and domestic gestures can reveal affection, conflict, or uncertainty without requiring a complete family history.
- Love and intimacy: The closeness of a speaking voice can resemble confession, conversation, or an unsent letter. Sentence rhythm allows desire, hesitation, resentment, and tenderness to coexist before the speaker reaches a settled conclusion.
- Loss and mortality: Grief rarely proceeds in a neat emotional sequence. Paragraphs can hold recollection, denial, physical detail, and reflection together, while shifts in syntax register the mind's attempts to approach what remains difficult to name.
- Nature and place: Sustained description can move beyond scenery by showing how perception changes over time. Weather, animals, landscapes, or seasonal details become consequential when they influence memory, decision, mood, or the speaker's sense of scale.
- Everyday life: Meals, school rooms, work, music, sports, and routine journeys offer recognizable surfaces beneath which tension can develop. The challenge is to select details that transform familiarity rather than merely catalogue it.
- Humor and absurdity: Conventional sentence flow can establish a reasonable tone while events become increasingly strange. Understatement, delayed information, precise repetition, and a well-timed final sentence can sharpen comic effect.
- War and social witness: Prose can place observation beside reflection, allowing public events to be encountered through particular bodies, voices, places, and consequences. Specificity helps prevent large subjects from becoming abstract declarations.
As you read the community poems, compare writers who address similar subjects. One may rely on scene, another on meditation, another on an intimate speaking voice. Those differences show how form does not merely contain a theme; it determines how the reader enters, experiences, and remembers it.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between a familiar textual surface and a heightened demand for attention. A prose-shaped piece may look conversational, narrative, or explanatory, yet memorable work makes every sentence carry more than information. The language must remain readable while generating pressure through rhythm, implication, image, and sequence. Too much ordinary exposition can flatten the experience; too much ornament can make the voice sound manufactured. The strongest writing finds a register in which clarity and intensity strengthen rather than cancel each other.
Structure feels necessary when it enacts the subject. A long, accumulating sentence may embody panic, appetite, wonder, or obsessive recollection; a clipped series may suggest shock, resistance, or emotional exhaustion. Paragraph divisions can register changes of time, consciousness, or authority. These choices matter because the reader cannot rely on prominent lineation to announce emphasis. If the piece is placed into one block merely as packaging, its shape contributes little. If syntax and paragraph movement reproduce the way the speaker perceives or avoids an experience, structure becomes inseparable from meaning.
Editors and attentive readers notice when craft elements cooperate. An image introduced early may return with altered significance. A casual voice may fracture when it reaches the fact it has been circling. Sound may quietly bind distant sentences, while punctuation controls how quickly the reader recognizes a change. Common weaknesses arise when the writer substitutes poetic-sounding adjectives for exact perception, forces rhyme into otherwise natural speech, repeats a mechanical sentence pattern, or explains every implication. Another frequent problem is insufficient development: the draft offers an anecdote or attractive image but does not let it alter the speaker's understanding.
Individuality remains visible through selection and syntax. Two poets can describe the same kitchen, farewell, storm, or childhood incident and create entirely different experiences by choosing different sensory evidence, narrative distance, tonal restraint, and order of disclosure. This is why comparing multiple community poems is so valuable. One example may make a particular strategy seem essential; several reveal that quality depends less on a single approved manner than on the precision with which each writer aligns voice, pacing, imagery, and emotional movement.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and let several community poems challenge your sense of what prose can accomplish in a poetry setting. Compare how different writers shape sentences, manage paragraphs, reveal emotion, and bring an experience to rest. When a piece holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a particular image, tonal turn, rhythmic choice, or ending.
Then try your own approach. Choose material that needs sustained movement, revise it for sound and pressure, and publish the finished work on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can become part of the continuing conversation among readers and writers exploring the form.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 12054 poems, providing many opportunities to compare how writers handle voice, sentence movement, imagery, narrative, and closure. Within a collection of this size, poets may follow familiar conventions, adapt them to suit particular subjects, or challenge expectations about how a prose piece should create poetic intensity. Reading across multiple entries offers a broader view than any single example can provide.
Sub Categories
Read wonderful prose poetry on the following sub-topics:
christmas, death, dog, family, food, friends, funny, kids, life, love, music, nature, school, sports, war
and more.
Definition | What is Prose 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.