Unafraid of corrupt abuse of
power sharing a bed with
my abusive ex husband
Definitely changed my locks
after the graveyard dirt left
behind from mafia scum
corrupt Talisa shaw Alicia
Hilton jay Townsend Johnson
Henry Danita delmont oh
Danny boy or girl agents
agents left over from my
abusive ex husband brothals
obsession to my American
poetry sending a few old
hitmen from Gotti degenerate
crews leaving threats hahaha
Immature laughing seeing
a murdered woman Gargano
unsolved Chicago murders
Ha ha ha R Hondas sadness
rolling with Gargano garbage
faking their deaths extortion
of traumatic brain injury claim
on behalf of my injuries money
laundering Milwaukee drug smugglers
stash in order to commit heist
on disabled Americans and their families
Left behind
enemy line
waving a torn
flag but I’m fine
dirt on my face
my boots worn
bullets passing
by me with the
speed of lightning
rapid friendly fire
exploded my skull
dust clears helmet hull
the clouds began to rise
wiping bloody tears
as I opened my eyes
my plattoons all gone
but I made it home
Written by Mrs Yolanda Joy Nicholsen
Down the dreamed aisle
comes the bliss of your sight
Cord of your life
sinew of your might.
Abaft the unending trek
comes the longed outset
A more colorful kismet
under the glorified sunset.
Wishful thinking
ceases the awakening
With thine caring
adoration is everlasting.
Miami heralds
statue of liberty claims,
american dream
You helped me see the real me and brought out the trueme you saw on the inside insteasd of that shy girl sitting in your class in 9th grade. I will always remember you as through the years I go and the advice you gave. You helped me so much and shaped who I am today.
Thank you so much for all you've done in my life and the difference you made. Your thebst teacher anyone could ask and hope for! You brought out my true heart and saw me on the inside then helped me so much...
YOUR THE VINE TO MY
SWEET JASMINE ROSE
THE WATER IS THE SOUL TO IT
IT GROWS WITH BEAUTIFUL
COLORS FROM THE LOVE WE HAVE
FOR EACH OTHER THAT NO ONE WILL EVER TAKE AWAY
MY MYSTERY ROSE YOU JUST DONT KNOW HOW MUCH
YOU MAKE ME SMILE THAT WATER AND VINE MISSES YOU DEARLY
NO ONE CAN REPLACE THAT WATER IT IS WHAT GOD GAVE YOU THAT YOU WILL NEVR EVER LOOSE ITS HERE STILL STANDING TALL AND BEAUTIFUL
GOD HAS US IN HIS HEART BABY YOU AINT GOING AWAY I WILL WALK THE WORLD A MILLION TIMES N BACK FOR YOU !!! THE VINE LOVES YOU YOUR ALWAYS ON OUR MINDS AND FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS U ARE APRT OF US
GOD WILL SHOW EVERY1 THAT THE DEVIL SHALL REAMAIN IN THE PIT CHAIN LOCKED !!
NATURE THAT THE FLOWER AND VINE REMNAIN TOGETHER :)
*****lol first attempt at Sehra, form..if I have failed will another wordsmith share their knowledge?:)
Kaleidoscope of Butterflies
~Tenors, base, all creating an seemingly endless hum… from beginning through songs duration……Tenors and base humming… in background sounding on and off, … in background…
Universe, space, stratosphere
ATMOSPHERE, Earth’
Joins two souls together
( Chorus, repeat 3x,s)
…..A likened to butterflies through a kalei’do’scope, we come together…..freely choosing to bond alike butterflies resting in moonlit fields, we come together…
Forest green, reddest-red,
Blue-citron silken veils
Brightly adorned faces, non-so lovely as bride, Le fem’
(Chorus)
Alike a rainbow
Colors expressing a Universal Atmosphere
Vibing radiantly, spilling-over, covering Earth
FULL of light and happiness at the resonance of vows
( Chorus, final)
Jill
~ for contest of Julia Ward ~
5~15~2016
Introduction
The richest tension in reading a sehra lies between public celebration and private consequence. The language must suit a ceremonial moment, yet the future being invoked belongs to two particular people. That tension gives readers much to notice: whether praise feels earned, whether blessing opens into vivid hopes, and whether the groom emerges as a person rather than a figure placed on a pedestal.
Different poets may approach that ceremonial task through solemn devotion, affectionate humor, family memory, cultural imagery, or glimpses of the couple's future daily life. Some voices may sound communal, as though a gathering speaks through the poem; others may feel intimate, shaped by a sibling, friend, elder, or observant witness. Because the occasion supplies a shared frame, small choices in address, detail, repetition, and tone can create strikingly different emotional experiences.
As you browse the community poems, consider how each poet balances honor with individuality and tradition with personal imagination. An isolated example can introduce the form's possibilities, but comparison reveals which features belong to the ceremonial expectation and which arise from a particular writer's voice. As contributions accumulate, read beyond the first example: the most instructive contrasts may appear in how poets portray character, imagine married life, shape blessing into memorable language, and bring a public poem to a personally resonant close.
Reading Guide
Read a sehra as both a written composition and an utterance meant to inhabit a significant gathering. Its praise, hopes, and invocations must reach the groom while also making sense to relatives, friends, and other listeners. As you read the community poems, look beyond the presence of ceremonial language. Ask how each craft decision turns an expected gesture into a distinctive portrait, emotional progression, or shared moment.
- Identify the speaker and implied listeners. A family elder, sibling, friend, or collective voice will praise differently. The relationship determines what can be said with authority and warmth. While comparing poems, ask: what does this speaker know about the groom, and how does that knowledge shape the address?
- Test the specificity of the praise. General compliments can sound appropriate but leave little impression. Concrete habits, values, memories, or images allow admiration to carry evidence. Ask: could these lines describe almost any groom, or do they reveal a recognizable person?
- Trace the movement from present ceremony to future life. A sehra can expand the wedding moment by imagining companionship, responsibility, home, difficulty, or joy ahead. Ask: where does the poem's attention travel, and does that movement deepen the blessing?
- Listen for ceremonial music. Recurring sounds and rhythmic steadiness can make words easier to receive and remember in performance, but excessive regularity may flatten feeling. Read passages aloud and ask: does the sound support dignity, delight, or prayer, or does it call attention mainly to itself?
- Notice tonal balance. Reverence need not exclude playfulness, and affection need not become exaggerated flattery. A tonal shift can humanize the groom or enlarge the emotional range. Ask: where does the poem become intimate, humorous, solemn, or reflective, and is the transition convincing?
- Study the final gesture. The ending may gather the community's hopes, return to the groom, widen toward the couple, or settle into prayerful quiet. Ask: does the close merely repeat earlier wishes, or does it transform them into a lasting emotional impression?
After reading, compare not only what each poet praises but how the praise is made credible. The most revealing differences often lie in voice, detail, sonic presence, and the imagined future toward which the poem directs its listeners.
Writing Tips
Begin your workshop draft by locating the human center of the ceremony. Before searching for elevated language, decide what this groom, this relationship, and this threshold in life mean to the speaker. A sehra becomes compelling when its public purpose and private knowledge strengthen each other. Build outward from a few truthful particulars, then shape them for listeners who may encounter the poem aloud.
- Choose material with emotional pressure. Select details that connect the groom's known character to the life being wished for him. Patience shown during difficulty, loyalty to family, generosity, or a characteristic humor can support praise without requiring inflated claims. The best material points simultaneously backward toward lived experience and forward toward marriage.
- Decide who has earned the right to speak. A close friend may use teasing affection; an elder may offer counsel; a communal voice may emphasize shared hopes. Keep the diction consistent with that relationship. A common mistake is adopting grand ceremonial language that no identifiable speaker would naturally use.
- Turn praise into portrayal. Do not stack flattering adjectives around the groom. Give admiration a physical or narrative basis: an action remembered, an image associated with him, or a value expressed through conduct. Specific praise feels generous; generic praise often feels merely obligatory.
- Imagine the future without scripting it. Blessing gains depth when it acknowledges that married life includes ordinary labor, mutual care, uncertainty, and growth as well as joy. Offer images spacious enough for the couple to inhabit. Avoid prescribing every virtue, role, or outcome as though the poem were issuing instructions.
- Let sonic pattern reinforce intention. Use recurring sounds to carry key names, wishes, or images into memory. If a rhyme forces awkward syntax, vague filler, or a word the speaker would never choose, revise the thought rather than defending the pattern. Ceremonial music should make expression feel inevitable, not constrained.
- Compose for breath and reception. Mark places where a performer can pause, emphasize a name, or allow listeners to respond emotionally. Long sentences may create flowing abundance; shorter units can lend clarity and gravity. Read the draft at speaking volume to discover where breathlessness weakens meaning or pauses break momentum.
- Use humor with relational precision. Gentle wit can release ceremonial stiffness and make affection believable, but the groom should not become the object of humiliation. Ask whether the joke welcomes the gathered community while preserving the dignity of the occasion and the privacy of the couple.
- Earn the ending through development. Do not attach a broad blessing simply because one is expected. Gather an earlier image, value, or sound and let it return with enlarged meaning. The close should feel like the emotional destination of the poem rather than a conventional label placed on it.
During revision, make separate passes for voice, imagery, sound, pacing, and closure. First remove interchangeable compliments and over-explanation. Next read aloud to test whether recurring sounds remain natural and whether the emotional turns can be heard without visual cues. Finally, ask a trusted reader what kind of man, marriage, and communal hope the poem leaves in mind. If the answer is vague, restore particularity before polishing ornament.
Interesting Facts
- Praise creates a demanding artistic problem. Because goodwill is expected, approval alone provides little surprise. The poet must discover fresh reasons, images, or tonal shades that make admiration feel observed rather than automatically granted.
- The poem can address several audiences simultaneously. Words directed toward the groom may also reassure family, honor the couple, involve the gathering, and express humility before the divine. A change of pronoun or address can therefore alter the social shape of the performance.
- Repetition has two opposite possibilities. A returning phrase can acquire ritual force as listeners anticipate and share it, yet an unchanged recurrence can become mechanical. Subtle shifts in context allow repeated language to gather meaning instead of merely occupying space.
- Future-facing language can create movement without telling a conventional story. The poem may progress through hopes, responsibilities, seasons, rooms, or imagined acts of care. This gives it an emotional journey even when no sequence of events is narrated.
- Performance changes the value of pacing. A pause after the groom's name, a gradual accumulation of blessings, or a restrained closing line may carry more force aloud than on the page. Punctuation and line endings can function as cues for breath, emphasis, and communal attention.
- Individuality often appears within expected gestures. Two poets may both offer praise and goodwill, yet differ completely in imagery, relationship to the groom, degree of humor, or vision of marriage. Comparing community interpretations helps readers distinguish the form's recognizable occasion from each poet's personal artistry.
Popular Themes
Subject matter in a sehra is never separate from occasion: each theme must contribute to celebration, blessing, portraiture, or the emotional meaning of transition. The following are literary possibilities rather than statistical rankings. Their usefulness depends on how specifically a poet connects them to the groom, the couple, and the assembled community.
- Crossing a threshold. Doors, roads, dawn, changing garments, or new rooms can embody movement from an earlier identity toward shared life. Such imagery gives the ceremony direction without reducing marriage to a simple before-and-after division.
- Character and responsibility. Patience, honesty, courage, tenderness, and reliability work best when shown through remembered conduct. Connecting established character to future responsibility makes praise both credible and forward-looking.
- Divine blessing and human humility. Prayerful language can place joy within a larger spiritual horizon. It becomes especially affecting when hope is voiced with gratitude and humility rather than certainty about what the future must bring.
- Companionship in ordinary life. Shared meals, conversation, work, weather, illness, laughter, and quiet rooms can turn abstract marital happiness into inhabitable experience. Domestic imagery often gives ceremonial wishes warmth and scale.
- Family and communal belonging. Marriage may be imagined as an expansion of relationship rather than an isolated bond. Images of welcome, kinship, inheritance, and mutual care allow the gathered listeners to recognize their place in the blessing.
- Joy tempered by change. Celebration can coexist with an elder's reflection, a sibling's sense of transition, or awareness that familiar relationships are being rearranged. This mild bittersweetness can deepen joy without darkening the occasion.
- Memory, place, and cultural continuity. Familiar landscapes, foods, fabrics, music, household objects, or family customs can anchor the poem in lived experience. Used selectively, such details make continuity tangible rather than decorative.
As you read the community poems, compare how writers transform similar themes through different speakers, images, and emotional turns. A threshold may appear as solemn responsibility in one interpretation and delighted possibility in another; the theme matters, but the poet's angle gives it life.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a sehra is that its social intention is known before the poem begins, while poetry depends on discovery. Listeners anticipate honor, goodwill, and hope; the writer must therefore create surprise without betraying the occasion. That surprise need not be dramatic. It may arise from an exact memory, an unexpectedly modest image, a tender shift from the groom to the couple, or a moment when communal celebration briefly reveals the speaker's personal attachment.
In a memorable poem, structure feels necessary because it enacts the ceremony's emotional work. Sonic recurrence can gather separate wishes into a shared current; measured pacing can give praise dignity; an accumulation of images can suggest abundance; a carefully placed pause can let a name or blessing settle among listeners. These devices become decorative when they merely announce formality. Editors and attentive readers listen for cooperation between pattern and subject: the music should clarify feeling, strengthen memory, and guide the movement from public address toward a more intimate or expansive understanding of married life.
Predictability is the chief risk, but it appears in several forms. Generic superlatives make the groom less visible rather than more honored. Forced wording chosen for sound can weaken the speaker's credibility. Mechanical patterning may produce ceremonial polish without emotional development, while over-explanation can turn blessing into advice or instruction. Another weakness is insufficient progression: the poem praises, wishes, and concludes, but nothing has deepened. Stronger work allows each section to alter what came before, perhaps moving from character to responsibility, from family memory to future companionship, or from exuberance to prayerful restraint.
Individuality survives shared convention through angle of vision. A poet may foreground affectionate wit, spiritual humility, domestic detail, cultural memory, or the moral qualities needed for partnership. The important question is not whether the poem sounds unlike every ceremonial piece, but whether its choices could have arisen only from this speaker's attention to this occasion. As more community poems become available, comparison sharpens judgment: readers begin to hear the difference between expected language and earned language, between repetition and development, and between ornamental praise and a blessing made memorable by particular human knowledge.
Read, Write & Share
Do not let your exploration end with the first piece you encounter. Read the sehra presented here, browse other community wedding and praise poems, and return as further interpretations join the collection. Compare how poets handle address, ceremonial music, personal detail, humor, prayer, and the imagined future.
Leave comments that identify a line of craft you admired or a choice that changed your understanding of the occasion. Then try composing your own sehra: write from a genuine relationship, revise it for the listening ear, and publish it on PoetrySoup so future readers can place your approach in conversation with the community's work.
Collection Statistics
At present, this collection contains 1 poem. That concentrated size offers multiple interpretive opportunities within a focused reading: visitors can examine voice, praise, imagery, sound, and closure closely, then use the poem as a point of comparison with their own drafts and future submissions. As the collection develops, contributing poets may follow, adapt, or challenge conventions while preserving a recognizable relationship to the ceremonial occasion.
Sehra Categories
Read wonderful sehra poetry on the following sub-topics:
groom, god, praise, wedding
and more.
Definition | What is Sehra 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.