From far away the mountains rise,
blue-silver shapes in morning’s glow.
Their ridges catch the sun’s first throw,
a shimmer brushed across the skies.
Warm wind carries the meadow’s sighs,
wildflowers breathing soft below.
From far away the mountains rise,
blue-silver shapes in morning’s glow.
And though I watch with open eyes,
the peaks stay wrapped in distant snow~
a pale, bright hush I long to know.
From far away the mountains rise.
When it pulls the strings, we dance
We are just puppets in its eyes
We become addicts in a trance
When it pulls the strings
Now its power is on the rise
Its web covers a vast expanse
It satisfies our needs, a guise
It gives us info at a glance
And it makes us feel very wise
Its huge web may give us no chance
When it pulls the strings
Within the whispered wind, bumble bees
fly their syncopated figure eights.
Praying mantises fall to their knees
…within the whispered winds.
Rich blessings float from heavenly gates
and set kissing dragonflies at ease
before all worldly sorrow abates.
Sunday psalms sung softly in the breeze
settle where the flock congregates.
Hallowed ambience exudes heartsease
…within the whispered wind.
Comeback-Shirley, starting early,
I'm the sparkle that teases night.
Worship, the Madonna baby!
Comeback-Shirley
Foam hair curlers set loose coils tight.
Strawberry cheeks, fans wish to see.
Appearances, tilt the glass right.
Put your sugar bowl out, missy.
The world shall call you its sunlight.
Stolen cradle, aren't you in glee?
Comeback-Shirley
Over by the bridge watch them link
Swans congregating before flight
Curtains of dusk drape at the brink
Over by the bridge
The ebon sky soon out of sight
as the red sun begins to sink
the chill of autumn fills the night
Gliding force, unabashed blinks
huddled they aim for evening light
as they swim together in sync
over by the bridge
Let’s conquer woes of fear and doubt
Battling against brokenness' pain
Vanquishing through hope ... gloomy pout
Our great faith wins!
Standing firm upon harsh terrain
We bounce back for championship bout
Proving that blest courage does reign.
Overcoming harshness of drought
Ferocious toward triumph gain
Freed by God* from cowardice-clout
Our great faith wins!
Mark 11:22 “And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.”
July 1, 2025
4th pl;ace, "Broken but bold enough to bounce back" Poetry Writing Contest
Sponsored by Anoucheka Gangabissoon; judged on 11/28/2025
I touch the sun and have some fun,
Leaping and bouncing and splashing,
Looking up when the day is done,
I touch the sun.
To the deep, down I come crashing,
The jumping orca, I'm the one,
Who is showing off and flashing.
'bove and below the waves I run,
My ocean friends call me dashing,
With my frolicking, all I stun,
I touch the sun.
Image #5
I THINK TOO MUCH
I think too much of what has been
I should let my heart rule the day
And treat it as a movie scene
I think too much
I’d let those thoughts just blow away
Nor ever work out what they mean
Keep a settled mind, some might say
A sharp edged blade may be too keen
But still cuts deep, as is its way
Yet can separate fat from lean
I think too much
The ghostly night was filled with gloom
As from your grave we walked away.
Grief-stricken, there beside your tomb;
Through Heaven's gate you've gone.
A friend you were until that day
You met your godforsaken doom
And taken through death's alleyway.
From the long stay in your dim room
Where pain and groaning came to stay,
Gossamer wings you now assume;
Through Heaven's gate you've gone.
Visual# 1
Where river bends on waves which sweep
The air rustling mild, I can see
Swans waltzing as dusk gloams to peep
Where river bends
Dressed in lace, how svelte they can be
While night shadows begin to creep,
Birds of grace prancing near each tree.
Bathed by mist, don't they fall asleep?
With zig-zag dance, on eve's marquee,
Plumes winging till morn...so to leap
Where river bends
The sunshine band, ember sunset.
Stunning swans' graceful elegance
Serenely swim, one can't forget.
The sunshine band
Overlay peace yet endlessness
Cast, swayed in the balmy breeze, yet
It displayed depth and eloquence;
The sunshine band
Loyalty to each other let
These white feathered benevolence
Dip their heads together, heart set.
The sunshine band
Image 1
Image #5
Over calm seas the sun does rise
Far away and seeming so small
Truth is where our perspective lies
Over calm seas
One of the largest of them all;
Sea creature with bandits disguise
The sun balancing like a ball
So deceived by fallible eyes
This whale makes the sun rise and fall
Painting red, orange, yellow skies
Over calm seas
Your cheating ways, you've sunk so low,
to win contests - that isn't right.
You've used AI, few sponsors know
Your cheating ways
MY ideas form, it’s time to write,
(Unlike AI, my brain is slow)
When poem’s done, I feel delight!
But AI wins, it's quite a blow
It's unfair and I feel uptight
We're NOT blind sheep, I want to show
Your cheating ways
You've missed a bit, there on your chin.
Thin reeds of river grass and fish—
cheeks-deep in roe, mud-covered twin,
you've missed a bit.
Let's bumble on to spawning's pitch
eat salmon-seasoned trout—with quince,
furs drenched in entrails glazey drip...
I long forgave your glutton sin,
big Grizz, I swear there is no hitch,
just time enough to feast with friends
you've missed a bit.
Dawn wakes nature; gold sun I see.
In orange sky it rises bright
with radiance enchanting me.
Dawn wakes nature.
Peeking down, sun shimmers its light.
There is a river running free
where birds are floating – a sweet sight.
As if it heard King Sun’s decree,
one bird, wings spread, prepares for flight
to follow river to the sea.
Dawn wakes nature.
Image #1
Introduction
The special pleasure of reading a roundel lies in hearing familiar language return with unfamiliar weight. A phrase that seems descriptive, hopeful, or casual at first may sound resigned, ironic, consoling, or final when it comes back. Because the poem has little room in which to prepare that change, every image, rhyme, and tonal adjustment participates in the transformation. The result can resemble a song heard twice under different emotional conditions.
As you read the community poems, compare how different writers manage this tension between recurrence and movement. One poet may use the refrain as an intimate confession; another may make it a public declaration, a comic interruption, or an answer the speaker cannot escape. Some poems create a seamless lyrical flow, while others sharpen the divisions between their parts so that the middle passage feels like an argument, memory, reversal, or moment of resistance. The compact design can accommodate tenderness, wit, grief, praise, satire, and narrative suggestion, but it asks each subject to become concentrated.
Browsing several poems reveals possibilities that an isolated example cannot. You can notice which poets let rhyme guide the thought, which make rhyme nearly invisible, and which use the returning words as the poem's emotional center. Read beyond the first example and consider how each poet interprets the balance among pattern, voice, and surprise. The shared framework makes comparison especially illuminating: small differences in syntax, pacing, or image placement can produce markedly different endings.
Reading Guide
A roundel rewards attentive rereading because its most important effects often occur between the first appearance of an idea and its return. Rather than treating the repeated language as a decorative chorus, listen for what has happened around it. The intervening lines may revise the speaker's confidence, expose a contradiction, deepen an image, or change the implied listener. As you browse the poems in this collection, read each one first for its emotional movement and then again for the craft that makes that movement possible.
- Track the refrain's changing meaning. Notice whether the returning words retain their original sense or acquire irony, grief, urgency, or reassurance. Ask: what does the poem teach me to hear differently when the phrase returns?
- Listen to the rhyme as thought. In such a compressed poem, a rhyme word receives unusual emphasis and can steer the argument toward an expected or surprising conclusion. Ask: do the rhymes reveal meaningful connections, or do they merely complete the pattern?
- Watch the middle passage. The central portion often carries the burden of development, supplying contrast, complication, evidence, or a shift in perspective. Ask: what changes here that makes the final return feel earned rather than automatic?
- Notice sentence movement across lines. A pause at every line can create ceremony or insistence, while syntax flowing over line endings can make the pattern feel conversational and urgent. Ask: how does each poet balance the visible structure against the natural movement of speech?
- Compare sonic texture beyond rhyme. Repeated consonants, internal echoes, vowel music, and stress can either bind the poem gently or make it ring with declaration. Ask: which sounds prepare the ear for the refrain, and which sounds create productive friction?
- Study the scale of the imagery. One exact image may carry more force than several loosely related ones because the roundel has limited space for development. Ask: does the poet choose an image capable of changing significance as the poem proceeds?
- Test the ending after a pause. Read the last return aloud, allowing silence before and after it. Ask: does it close the emotional circuit, deliberately leave it open, or expose something the speaker has resisted saying?
Compare several poets' approaches before deciding what the form can sound like. Its shared pattern makes subtle differences unusually audible, especially differences in tone, syntax, and the emotional function of repetition.
Writing Tips
Begin a roundel with an emotional situation that can change under repetition. The best material is not merely small enough to fit a compact poem; it contains a phrase, claim, question, or image that deserves to be heard twice. Before drafting, identify what the speaker believes at the opening and what the reader should understand by the close. That difference gives the pattern a dramatic purpose.
- Choose a refrain with semantic room. A narrowly factual phrase may return without gaining resonance. Look for language that can function as statement and question, comfort and accusation, promise and doubt. If the words are drawn from your opening, make sure they sound natural both there and in their later positions.
- Draft the emotional arc before solving the rhymes. Write a brief prose account of the poem's movement: declaration, complication, altered return. This prevents available rhyme words from dictating the subject. Once the movement is clear, rhyme can intensify connections rather than manufacture them.
- Give the middle passage a real task. Do not use it merely to delay the ending. Let it introduce a counterimage, reveal a cost, address another person, or overturn an assumption. The final refrain depends on this pressure; without development, it will sound copied rather than transformed.
- Build a flexible rhyme bank. Gather exact rhymes, slant possibilities, related grammatical forms, and phrases that place the rhyme word naturally at the point of emphasis. Reject any choice that requires inverted syntax, padding, or an unexplained shift in diction. Formal compliance is not worth a sentence the speaker would never plausibly say.
- Use line length as breath control. Even when maintaining a consistent measure, vary syntax and punctuation so that every line does not land with the same thud. A sentence may run forward to create anticipation, while a firm stop can make a warning or admission feel unavoidable.
- Limit the image field. Select one governing image or a closely related cluster rather than introducing a new symbol in every line. Repetition already creates density; coherent imagery gives the reader something stable against which changes in tone can register.
- Protect the speaker's individuality. The polished music of a roundel can tempt writers toward generalized lyric language. Replace abstract terms with details the particular speaker would notice, and test whether the diction belongs to the poem's situation rather than to an inherited idea of poetic speech.
- Avoid announcing the conclusion too early. If the opening explains the entire emotional lesson, the return has nowhere to go. Leave a degree of uncertainty around the initial phrase, then let context clarify, challenge, or darken it. The ending may repeat words, but it should not merely repeat information.
During revision, read the draft aloud twice: once without pausing for the pattern and once with full attention to line endings, stanza spaces, and refrain. Mark places where rhyme distorts emphasis, breath becomes awkward, or repeated language loses energy. Then ask a reader what changed between the first and final return. If the answer is unclear, strengthen the middle turn or sharpen the image that carries it; if the answer is too obvious, remove explanation and let sound, juxtaposition, and recurrence do more of the work.
Interesting Facts
- Repetition is not the same as sameness. The refrain's wording may remain stable while its emotional meaning changes because of the lines surrounding it. This makes context, rather than vocabulary alone, one of the roundel's chief expressive tools.
- Brevity can increase rather than reduce difficulty. There is little neutral space in which to hide a weak image, convenient rhyme, or unnecessary adjective. A single padded phrase can disturb the proportion and weaken the musical inevitability of the return.
- The opening carries two responsibilities. It must engage the reader immediately while also planting language capable of surviving repetition. An effective beginning therefore looks forward even when it sounds complete in the moment.
- The refrain can support opposite emotional effects. A return may feel soothing when it restores order, obsessive when the speaker cannot escape it, comic when context undercuts it, or devastating when new knowledge changes its meaning.
- Silence participates in the form. Stanza breaks and the brief space before a refrain can create suspense, hesitation, or ceremonial emphasis. In performance, a carefully judged pause may reveal the poem's structure without making it sound mechanically counted.
- Variation is most convincing when the underlying identity remains audible. Poets may adjust phrasing, punctuation, stress, or the degree of rhyme exactness, but successful adaptations preserve the felt experience of return and transformation. Reading several community interpretations helps distinguish purposeful flexibility from an abandoned pattern.
- Readers often remember the return more than the route. That places unusual pressure on the words chosen for recurrence. Yet the route still matters: the intervening imagery and tonal shift determine whether those remembered words feel inevitable, surprising, or merely familiar.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and structure interact closely in a roundel because recurrence implies that something cannot simply be left behind. A returning phrase may resemble memory, ritual, insistence, music, or thought circling back upon itself. The themes below are literary possibilities rather than measured popularity rankings, and each can be approached in markedly different voices.
- Love and divided feeling. Affection rarely remains emotionally simple when language returns. A phrase of devotion can become a plea, a doubt, or an acknowledgment of distance after the middle passage complicates it.
- Farewell and separation. The refrain naturally dramatizes difficulty in letting go. Repeated words may enact a formal goodbye while revealing that the speaker remains inwardly attached to the person, place, or former life being addressed.
- Memory and return. A remembered scene can be presented once as image and later as interpretation. The compact design suits the way a small sensory detail suddenly opens onto a larger history without requiring extensive narrative.
- Grief and consolation. Repetition can imitate mourning's recurring thoughts, but it can also create steadiness. The strongest poems often allow consolation and pain to coexist rather than forcing the refrain into an uncomplicated message of recovery.
- Seasons and transience. Cycles of weather, light, growth, and decline align naturally with verbal recurrence. A poet can contrast nature's return with human change, making the same phrase register continuity and loss at once.
- Vows, prayers, and appeals. Repeated language can acquire the force of ritual or persuasion. The intervening lines may supply reasons, doubts, or resistance, so the final appeal sounds tested rather than merely emphatic.
- Irony, satire, and comic reversal. A confident opening can be undermined by what follows, allowing the refrain to return as a punch line or self-exposure. Tight patterning helps control timing, especially when the final words reveal a gap between what the speaker says and what the reader perceives.
As you read the community poems, compare how writers transform similar subjects through different refrains, images, and tonal turns. Two poems may address farewell or memory yet produce opposite effects because one seeks release while another uses recurrence to resist it.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of the roundel is that its language must return while its poem must move. A technically recognizable draft may place its echoes correctly and maintain an orderly sound pattern, yet leave the reader exactly where the opening left them. A memorable poem treats recurrence as an event. By the time the refrain comes back, a new image, disclosure, tonal disturbance, or shift of address has altered the conditions under which the words are heard. Structure then becomes inseparable from meaning: the poem could not make the same argument in a straight line.
Strong examples also understand that compression is selective, not merely brief. They do not attempt to summarize an entire relationship, season, or bereavement. Instead, they find a charged moment capable of implying the larger experience: a hand withdrawn, a room after departure, a familiar path under changed light. Rhyme and measured pacing concentrate attention around that image. When craft and subject reinforce each other, the formal returns may suggest obsession, ritual, reassurance, entrapment, or acceptance without the speaker needing to explain those meanings directly.
Several weaknesses can make the design feel decorative. Predictable phrasing may reveal the destination before the poem has generated tension. Forced inversions and vague abstractions often signal that rhyme has overruled voice. Mechanical patterning gives every line identical weight, flattening the contrast needed for the refrain to evolve. Over-explanation is equally damaging: if the speaker announces precisely how the reader should interpret each return, repetition loses its resonance. At the opposite extreme, insufficient development leaves the middle of the poem unable to change anything, so the ending sounds like a reset rather than a culmination.
Individuality remains visible through the decisions the framework cannot make for the poet: who is speaking, what remains unsaid, which concrete detail carries the emotion, how syntax crosses a line, and whether the refrain consoles or unsettles. Even punctuation can redirect the returning phrase from statement to question or from private thought to public address. Comparing multiple community poems sharpens editorial judgment because it reveals that correctness is only the threshold. Read for necessity: does each poet make the pattern feel chosen by the subject, and does the final return repay the attention demanded by the first?
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on a single impression of what a roundel can accomplish. Compare how each writer handles the refrain, builds pressure through the middle, and changes the emotional force of familiar words. When a poem stays with you, leave a thoughtful comment about a specific image, sound, turn, or return that made the effect possible.
Then try composing your own. Choose language worth hearing again, give it a reason to change, revise it aloud, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can extend the conversation while giving other readers another approach to consider.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 462 poems, offering ample opportunity to compare how different writers approach recurrence, rhyme, compression, voice, and closure. Some poets may follow the established conventions closely, while others may adapt or challenge them in pursuit of a particular emotional or musical effect. Reading across the collection helps reveal both the form's recognizable identity and the range of choices available within it.
Roundel Categories
Definition | What is Roundel 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.
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