I shall remember you when
night crawls under day
dressed up in sunshine and
colorful hues I shall remember
you in every single book I
read catering to the fundamental
findings craving thought like
Langston Hughes I’ll fondly
remember civil rights field
trips dancing through cattails
in the woods wandering
between dandelion patches
and rows of daisies peeking
through cedar slats nestled
upon a garden nook I dig the
magnificent magnitude of our
telepathy designs of hope
courage and joy I will always
remember your smile opening
the window letting fresh air
inside a dull dim room something
about William Butler Yeats
Yolande Giovanni something
about me black power rings
the subtle warmth of the
voice of dignity human need
to express one’s own abilities
communicate with all walks
of life we are who we are
I thank you for giving me
encouragement my humble
beginnings I shall see you
tomorrow in paradise sunshine
In loving memory of Nikki Giovanni
Totally unable to create
anything with so many
ads i upgraded to lifetime
only to be able to turn off
unwanted ads Indeed I'm
patient enough to wait
unwanted ads just can't
be forever they just can't
We move accordingly using
less air to breathe wandering
about the crued oils of dirt
grime corruption coated
with uncommon valor seen
by millions witnessed by
none we move in separate
lives coasting throughout
mental health relief desperate
an yet clothed with the
blood of everyone totally
exempt from taxation
missing broken overlooking
the rise of Jerusalem
No I said no
what don’t you
understand no
abusing no
name calling
no me and you
No no no
please go
1-934 on license plates
Ciro Gargano
obsession to my life
actually hacking into
tele health calls hidden
cameras in ceiling fans
ac vents smoke detectors
sadly arson murder of 9
people Ciro Gargano
12-3-1934 unauthorised
access to classified data
documents being
exploited over unseen
mafia wire taps exploiting
disabled Americans
victimization discrimination
terrorist threats back
off scum blackmail
returned to sender
America be vigilant
when using tele health
at home signal fail camera
freeze you’re hack your
conversation is being
played over mafia
criminal groups
hacking into disabled
persons disabled families
information cyberattack
retrieving data exploited
disabled veterans military
service members and
their families thanks for the
veterans administration
for alerting my family
this has caused emotional
stress anyone in crisis
please reach out awareness
saves lives god bless America
The wind did blow the ground
shook the sky opened grace
removing all doubt as my mere
flesh unaged unharmed asencends
into the midst with him my mind
opened relieving all tampered
thought confusion and fear malice
removed compassion created
a personal gratification of solitude
while my hearts on fire I desire
only him his presence surrounds
me the sound of trumpets and
harp strings captured solace
in a trance essence illuminated
fragrances abode the sun shined
beneath my feet in a distant glare
bright brilliant heavenly hues
opened the gates as I am calmly
seated at the table of plenty
darkness vanishes within the
alurring abyss night is no more
I never understood this condition
that continued to invade my writing
skills at first I would write then go
back to put the punctuation in this
made my poems end abruptly when
I needed my readers to continue my
story hadn't ended until that punctuation
stalled my readers from finishing my poem
I sat up searching for why I composed this
way soon my style of writing was compared
to e.e cummings he too often left out the
punctuation I read further there was Ulysses
James Joyce Cormac Mc Carthy I began
to realize I was different but I wasn't alone
great scholars and Nobel prize winners
also had my condition why there was
a word for this style of writing a word
for why I was comfortable leaving out
the punctuation defamiliarisation in fact
I believe this allows my readers to know
right away this is my original work I wouldn't
change a thing in further research I found
a few more poets just like me in Russia
why I Certainly would call this a poem
perhaps a commentary of sorts a very
creative way to use this new word I'm
quite fond of defamiliarisation absolutely
driven creative culture of an awesome read
Your face, your soul in me
Your love, special memory in me
Breath in me, life I offer thee
Soul in me, spirit travels with thee
Moon that covers thee, face I long to see
Clouds mesmerizing me, colors of the sky so free
Sun of morning glory, star uplifting me
Birds of songs in sortie -- chanting, adoring thee.
My song you sing with me
My melody you play for me
My life, my heart, my plea
Starts and ends with thee.
Express I warm approval or admiration of, HIM
We can’t praise HIM enough, burning is my emotions for HIM
My body moves in HIS breath
Admiration I applaud pay tribute to HIM
Speaking to the surroundings, toward the skies as I
I rave, I rant, I sing I dance in praises
Heap in praise, praise on Alleluia
Sing my song dance to my hymn
Approval acclaims I admirations toward the internal name of HIM
His name above others I praise
Hail, cheer in approval, acclaim, ADMIRATION OF PRAISES OF HIM--Alleluia
8/25/19
Written words by James Edward Lee Sr. ©2019
your my everything
all love bring
love all you say and do
i say too
baby
NEED YOU
Dancing with the Devil
Hand we hand we danced the night away.
For I was your queen... or so you had made it seem.
But I knew the truth
You had another lover.
You gazed upon my body but you seemed to have been staring at my soul,
For I had glanced at yours a few times and I saw that you were cold,
I was dancing with the devil.
Somehow I couldn’t allow myself to stop.
Somehow I thought I’d win this game
I then realized it was a losing battle and I was playing myself.
I was fighting for a heart that was owned by someone else.
Even though I refused to accept it I knew we’d eventually grow apart.
Why should I stay when the goal was to exchange hearts?
You give me yours and you would have mine,
The plan was that I’d love you till the end of time.
Love someone who’s already taken? Then what would be in it for me?
A heart that was already broken? And reopened scars that weren’t fully healed?
I danced with the devil.
He dragged me through hell but I still stayed.
Because I tried to convince myself that somehow he’d change.
But I was dancing with the devil… stuck in his maze.
I was dancing with the devil; playing his game.
Spelunking inside her mind,
searching for the answer she cannot find.
She keeps looking, draped in fear
as she asks, why am I here?
No one is guiding her path
she only exists as an aftermath
of two drifting, lost souls
who were unable to define their goals.
Two humans united on a withering night,
giving spark to a life without delight.
How could they in such despair
not be fully aware
that the seeds of poverty they sewed
would grow up to be predisposed
to a life of abject gloom
because their spirits contained not one bloom.
Growing up with a feeling of being alone,
keenly aware she didn't belong
in a community with a rare glimpse of grace
for a family seemingly out of place.
Streets lined with false facades
of people believing they were a favorite of God's.
A little child unable to discern and find her way
became the nasty people's prey.
After years on the battlefield of life,
she again feels the pain that cuts like a knife.
A divorced mother of two; one a father, the other gay,
they both live far, far away.
She bows her head to pray,
and ask why does it have to be this way.
Her heart is empty of cheer.
She softly whispers, why am I here?
the reasoning the fishing in the trenches
beyond tire swings and monkey wrenches
follies crawl behind the hanging logos
of unseen filth across 124th street
tassels dangled above an oasis
of fine dining and soiled linen
over the board rooms covered
in a mesh of purple mustard
beckoning ancient aura solid creed
coming throughout hidden rivalry
tampered with ankara's answering service
gravely time passes abaundantly
coarse and yet shunned quietly
we remember the malitia moreover
we began a new wearing gray hoodies
offering our youth to silent the storm
that brewed inside a percolator
pot of copenhagan snuff chewing tobacco
screaming a cure for cancer shall rise
over bob marley's tears as we munster up
courage a courage of faith challenged
behind the wrecking ball of ground zero
we count one more time mon
freedom will soon come
in our most sinful hope
Introduction
The most compelling pleasure of reading a Qawwali poem lies in sensing language reach beyond the silent page. Invocation, praise, longing, and repeated address can suggest a lead voice gathering force while other voices wait to answer. The poem therefore has two audiences at once: the sacred presence being addressed and the human community listening. That double orientation gives even an intimate confession a potentially communal resonance.
Different writers may emphasize different parts of that experience. One poet may build an ardent direct address; another may favor contemplative imagery, dramatic questioning, or an escalating sequence of praises. Some may write with an implied refrain or choral response, while others may create musical pressure through recurring phrases, internal echoes, and lengthening sentences. The beloved may appear clearly spiritual, deliberately ambiguous, or glimpsed through earthly images that carry devotional implications.
The community setting matters because no isolated example can reveal the full range of choices available. As you browse the poems in this collection and return when new work appears, notice where each writer locates the poem's source of energy: in melody, repetition, spiritual argument, emotional ascent, or the relationship between solitary speaker and imagined gathering. Side-by-side reading also exposes meaningful differences in pacing. One poem may rise gradually toward surrender, while another begins in urgency and deepens through recurrence. Each new contribution becomes both an individual act of devotion or interpretation and an invitation to reconsider how written language can preserve the participatory spirit of performance.
Reading Guide
Read a Qawwali poem with both the eye and the inward ear. Its lineation matters, but so does the performance the page encourages you to imagine: a phrase returning with increased force, a lead voice making room for response, or an image becoming more charged each time it is revisited. Rather than asking only what the poem says, attend to how it gathers spiritual and emotional intensity. When comparing community poems, consider whether the language feels merely repeated or genuinely transformed by recurrence, and whether the speaker's devotion becomes an experience the reader can enter.
- The direction of address: Identify who is being praised, questioned, sought, or remembered. A clearly felt relationship gives the lyric urgency. When comparing poems, ask how each speaker's manner of address-humble, ecstatic, pleading, intimate, or ceremonial-shapes the spiritual atmosphere.
- Repetition with development: Notice recurring names, appeals, images, or declarations. Repetition can deepen conviction, gather momentum, or imitate absorbed meditation, but only if its context changes. Ask what the repeated language means on its final appearance that it did not mean initially.
- The implied exchange of voices: Look for phrases that could invite an answer, echo, affirmation, or choral return. Even a poem presented as a single voice can suggest communal participation. Ask where you can hear a possible movement between leader and gathering.
- Sonic propulsion: Listen for vowel patterns, consonant clusters, internal rhyme, parallel phrasing, and emphatic names. These features help written language imply melody and percussion. Read passages aloud and ask which poem creates momentum without depending on visible explanation.
- The emotional ascent: Trace changes in intensity rather than expecting a conventional plot. The speaker may move from absence to nearness, restraint to surrender, or praise to rapture. Ask whether each stage feels earned or whether the poem reaches its emotional height too quickly.
- Images with more than one register: Gardens, wine, fire, doors, journeys, wounds, and beloved figures can operate physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Ask whether an image opens several possible meanings while preserving the poem's devotional center.
- The final release: Observe whether the ending resolves, repeats, suspends, or leaves an after-echo. In a performance-conscious poem, closure may feel less like a conclusion than the point at which language yields to silence. Ask what emotional state the ending leaves behind.
Read beyond the first example as the collection develops. Comparing approaches will sharpen your sense of which choices belong to shared expectations and which reveal an individual poet's voice.
Writing Tips
Begin by imagining not a page but a charged listening space. Who speaks, what sacred presence or spiritual figure is addressed, and what might a gathered audience repeat or affirm? A strong draft needs more than elevated subject matter: it needs an emotional movement that sound can carry. Before arranging lines, write the central invocation, question, or declaration in language you would be willing to say repeatedly and mean more deeply each time.
- Choose material capable of intensification. Praise, yearning, separation, gratitude, surrender, and the search for guidance can deepen through return. A minor anecdote may still work, but it should open toward a larger spiritual recognition. Ask whether your subject can sustain several waves of attention rather than a single clever statement.
- Give the address a living relationship. Do not use a revered name or devotional title merely as decoration. Let the speaker need something: proximity, forgiveness, instruction, remembrance, or release from the self. Specific need prevents praise from becoming a sequence of interchangeable compliments.
- Design repetition as a staircase, not a circle. A refrain should encounter a changed image, question, or emotional condition whenever it returns. Altering the surrounding syntax can make identical words sound pleading at first, certain later, and finally ecstatic. Mechanical repetition is a common beginner mistake because it imitates the surface of performance without producing development.
- Write for breath and response. Mix expansive passages with short phrases that could be echoed by other voices. Strategic pauses can create anticipation before a name, appeal, or revelation. If every line has the same weight and duration, the draft may feel recited rather than gathered into musical momentum.
- Let sound support meaning. Use internal echoes, alliteration, open vowels, and rhythmic parallels where they intensify the speaker's state. Avoid forcing ornate diction or rhyme simply to sound ceremonial. Devotional conviction is weakened when the reader notices strained phrasing before hearing the appeal beneath it.
- Build images into a coherent field. Select a few related images-such as thirst and water, distance and roads, darkness and lamps-and allow them to evolve. Too many unrelated symbols can make spiritual feeling seem generalized. Concrete sensory details give longing a body without requiring the poem to explain every implication.
- Balance intimacy with participation. Preserve the speaker's particular temperament, memories, and doubts while creating points where readers can inwardly join the utterance. A highly private confession may need a recurring phrase that opens outward; a ceremonial draft may need one vulnerable detail that establishes individual stakes.
- Earn the height of the ending. Do not assume that louder language, more exclamation marks, or increasingly grand claims will create ecstasy. Let the conclusion emerge from accumulated sound and altered understanding. Sometimes surrender, a shortened refrain, or a sudden quiet can carry more force than a final burst of praise.
During revision, read the entire draft aloud several times: once slowly for sense, once at an energetic performance pace, and once while another reader marks where attention rises or slackens. Cut explanations that merely translate the images. Test every recurrence by asking what has changed since its previous appearance. Finally, examine whether line breaks, pauses, sound, imagery, and the ending all serve the same devotional movement rather than competing to display technique.
Interesting Facts
- Written silence can imply an absent ensemble. A pause after an invocation or a brief standalone phrase may let readers imagine an answer that is not printed. This makes spacing an active part of the poem's communal experience rather than merely a visual arrangement.
- Exact repetition does not require exact emotion. The same phrase can register first as hope, then desperation, certainty, or surrender. Its effect depends on what intervenes, so experienced writers often revise the path between repetitions as carefully as the repeated words themselves.
- Devotional and earthly language can coexist productively. Images of desire, intoxication, beauty, absence, and reunion may carry several levels of significance. The resulting ambiguity is strongest when the poem's spiritual stakes remain palpable rather than being explained away.
- Intensity is not the same as volume. Exclamation, praise, and rapid recurrence can create excitement, but restraint may generate equal pressure. A quiet address that gradually sheds doubt can produce an ascent as compelling as overt rapture.
- The page tests musical language differently from performance. Melody and ensemble energy can sustain a phrase aloud; in a written poem, syntax, imagery, and placement must also reward rereading. This makes apparently simple repeated language harder to compose effectively than it may seem.
- Individuality often appears in the route, not merely the destination. Several poets may write toward devotion or surrender, yet one may travel through memory, another through argument, and another through sensory vision. Comparing community interpretations reveals how shared expectations can support sharply different imaginative journeys.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form are inseparable here because the poem's theme must withstand recurrence, vocal emphasis, and emotional enlargement. The following possibilities are literary affinities, not statistical popularity rankings. Each can support the movement from personal utterance toward a more communal or transcendent experience.
- Longing for presence: A speaker's desire to approach the sacred gives repeated appeals increasing urgency. Distance can be rendered through roads, thresholds, unanswered calls, or glimpses that keep nearness and absence in tension.
- Praise and gratitude: Praise works best when it develops rather than simply accumulating flattering descriptions. Each return can reveal another consequence of grace, allowing gratitude to become discovery instead of a static list.
- Separation and reunion: Alternation between loss and anticipated return naturally supports emotional ascent. Repeated names or images can measure how the speaker changes while waiting, remembering, or moving toward reconciliation.
- Guidance and discipleship: A spiritual teacher or revered figure can become the focus of questions, petitions, and acts of trust. This theme creates dramatic stakes when the speaker must relinquish pride, certainty, or self-sufficiency.
- Surrender of the self: The tension between individual will and spiritual submission can shape the entire progression. As language repeats and intensifies, the speaker's claims may narrow until only acceptance, praise, or silence remains.
- Ecstasy and transformation: Fire, flight, intoxication, dance, and overflowing water can embody states too expansive for literal description. Recurrence helps these images feel experienced in waves rather than reported from a distance.
- The earthly and divine beloved: Deliberately layered love language can make tenderness, desire, and devotion illuminate one another. The challenge is to sustain meaningful ambiguity without allowing the poem's spiritual orientation to become vague.
As you read the community poems, compare how different writers transform similar themes through voice, sound, imagery, and pacing. Shared subject matter need not produce similar poems: the decisive distinction often lies in where the emotional ascent begins, what resists it, and what the speaker becomes by the end.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between private devotion and communal utterance. The speaker may confess an intensely personal hunger, yet the language must also feel capable of being heard, answered, and inhabited by others. A merely recognizable example can display invocation, heightened diction, and recurrence without resolving that tension. A memorable poem makes the solitary voice seem enlarged-not erased-by the possibility of collective response. Its speaker remains psychologically particular even while reaching toward a shared state of praise, yearning, or surrender.
Structure feels necessary when every return alters the reader's relation to the central words. Repetition should function as pressure: an appeal gathers evidence, an image acquires spiritual resonance, or a confident statement is tested by doubt before returning with new authority. Sound and pacing then become forms of thought. A shortened line may mark humility; a swelling sentence may embody rapture; a pause may admit what language cannot contain. Editors notice when these decisions reinforce the subject so completely that another arrangement would diminish the poem's emotional logic.
Common weaknesses usually arise from mistaking recognizable signals for achieved experience. Grand titles and devotional vocabulary cannot substitute for a credible relationship between speaker and addressee. Predictable repetitions may stall the poem, forced rhymes may make reverence sound performative, and dense ornament can conceal the human need that should animate the praise. Over-explanation creates another problem: if every image is immediately decoded, the poem loses the layered resonance through which earthly longing can suggest spiritual desire. At the opposite extreme, insufficient development leaves a sequence of beautiful phrases without an ascent, crisis, or deepening act of surrender.
Individuality survives shared conventions through the poet's selection of pressure points. One speaker may approach devotion through doubt, another through gratitude, another through grief, sensuous imagery, disciplined restraint, or exuberant verbal abundance. The important question is not whether poets sound alike, but whether each poem discovers a convincing route from address to transformation. Comparing several community poems is therefore essential as the collection grows. It teaches readers to distinguish convention from cliché, intensity from exaggeration, and purposeful recurrence from mechanical patterning. It also shows writers that fidelity to a performance-centered devotional spirit does not require the sacrifice of personal history, linguistic texture, or imaginative risk.
Read, Write & Share
Browse the poems in this collection, and as new work appears, read several rather than treating the first encounter as the form's final possibility. Compare the handling of address, repetition, musical momentum, spiritual imagery, and emotional ascent. A thoughtful comment might identify the phrase that gathered force, the image that opened into several meanings, or the moment when the speaker's private longing became communal.
Then try composing and publishing your own Qawwali on PoetrySoup. Bring a distinct voice to the shared devotional and performance-centered expectations, and let other readers respond to the choices that make your interpretation personal.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 1 Qawwali poem. At this size, the page invites close attention: a single text can sustain multiple interpretations and can be compared with devotional, musical, and performance-centered expectations. It also establishes a point of reference for future submissions. As the collection develops, poets may follow, adapt, or challenge conventions, widening the opportunities for side-by-side comparison.
Qawwali Categories
Definition | What is Qawwali 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.
devotional, fard, farsi, ghazal, hamd, hazal, hijv, lyric, madah, manqabat, marsiya, masnavi, munaajaat, musaddas, naat, nazm, qasida, qataa, rubaiyat, rubayi, salaam, seharaa, song, urdu, vaasokht