Season of death
Told to fear
Before bitter cold
Making everyone scream
For some warmth
And loving touch
Stay in touch
After the death
With some warmth
And no fear
Morbid many scream
Awaiting the cold
Decide embrace cold
With forceful touch
Hear the scream
Proclaiming the death
Eyes express fear
Needing some warmth
Getting the warmth
Fighting the cold
And the fear
With caring touch
Defeating ugly death
That creates a scream
Why a scream?
All filled warmth
Body shell death
Purple silver cold
Ghosts need touch
Soothe the Fear
Dispense the fear
Memories laughing scream
Everyone seems touch
Words igniting warmth
Melting the cold
Celebrating the death
Conquering fear death
Instead scream warmth
When touch cold
Battery full if charge and life
Why are people so full of strife
Why are some people born with full bars
While others are still looking for a charge
Battery used and broken
Why can there just be a potion
One to fill a battery who's lost and lonely
One who is tired and ghostly
One to end it all
and bring peace to those it calls
Those running on empty
And gives them their happy ending
Christina why do you laugh
at the men with whom you make love?
Do you have beliefs, any hopes?
Do you cry?
Do you need?
Do you fear?
Christina tell me all your fears
Ignore the devil when he laughs
Like me I know you need
someone special to love
I say "In the rain we all cry
when we lose sight of hope."
Christina do you see the lighthouse of hope
Or the angry sea as fear?
She asks "Have you ever seen a seagull cry
Or for that fact laugh?"
"They are free of the burden of love
But they see the sea as home."
Christina cries in need
"What does it take to have hope?"
"I want love
I hate fear
I want to laugh
Whenever I cry"
"Christina please don't cry
Because it's you I need
I want to hear God laugh
I want to shake His hand and hope
That all of my fears
Don't get in the way of all my love"
Christina is in love
That is why she can cry
The angry sea crashes in fear
That's how it feeds its need
To destroy all hope
and the reason we all laugh
So Christina you don't need to fear
As land is now within sight
And as you reach shore we will reunite
The taste lingers,
A thought conveys
Childhood at its best,
The idea hovers
The feelings engender
The deeply converged experiences in my chest!
I remember the fruit
The sugars divine,
The crusty pastry defined,
The shape of the slice,
The triangular trick
Exquisitely, to my observation, delicately refined!
Who wants a piece?
Who'd like a sniff?
Oh! What will it instill?
What elegant thought?
What instant delight,
Connects this taste to the smell of the fill?
A fleeting emotion,
A word of support,
Quickly surrounds the scene,
Of pine trees
And plum trees,
And muscadines hanging, clothed in a matchless sheen!
The last snow of winter
blown by the wind
bares the gray
of branches to the sun
pregnant with buds.
Is it spring?
Testing spring
torpid from the winter
sleepy tiny buds
hesitant of the wind
search for the sun
between stalks of gray
A flash of red among the gray
a robin singing spring
drinking the sun
snow melt of winter
unfettered by the wind
shaking the buds
Softens around the buds
warmed by the sun
the frozen clay of winter
helped by the gray
showering clouds of spring
and milder wind
With gentler wind
and warming sun
the colors of spring
unfold in the opening buds
after the long gray
days of winter
Good-bye winter winds
Gray days without sun
Hello new buds of festive spring
On this day of love and joy,
Two hearts become one, oh boy!
A union of two souls so pure,
A bond that will forever endure.
The groom awaits his blushing bride,
With love and admiration in his eyes,
She walks down the aisle with grace,
A smile on her face that lights up the place.
In the presence of family and friends,
Their love story reaches its happy end,
A promise to cherish, love, and hold,
For better or worse, in sickness and gold.
As they exchange their vows of love,
A peacefulness descends from above,
A union blessed by heavens' hand,
Sealed with a kiss and wedding band.
With love and laughter, they celebrate,
The start of a beautiful, joyful fate,
A life of love, trust, and togetherness,
May their love grow stronger with every caress.
May this day be the beginning of a beautiful life,
A love that transcends every trouble and strife,
A journey of endless joy, adventure, and fun,
A love that shines as bright as the sun.
A fetus is a person, a life yet to be born,
A precious soul waiting for its turn,
To enter this world and take its place,
In the loving arms of its family and grace.
It grows and develops within the womb,
Protected and nurtured, it starts to bloom,
From a single cell to a tiny being,
A miracle of life, forever freeing.
Its heart beats strong, its tiny limbs move,
As it prepares for life, its journey to groove,
A precious gift, a bundle of joy,
A new life to love, to cherish and enjoy.
Some may say it's just a clump of cells,
But to the parents, it's much more than that,
A dream come true, a new chapter in life,
A chance to grow, to love, and to thrive.
To deny the fetus its right to live,
Is to deny its future, its potential to give,
To the world, to its family, to everyone around,
A life worth living, a gift so profound.
A fetus is a person, a life yet to be born,
A precious soul waiting for its turn,
To enter this world and make its mark,
A new beginning, a journey to embark.
Love, a word so simple and yet so grand
A feeling that takes hold of our hearts and hands
It sweeps us off our feet and takes us high
It fills our world with colors we can't deny
Love is a flame that never fades
A light that shines through life's dark shades
It warms our souls and gives us hope
It teaches us how to trust and cope
Love is a journey that we embark
With every beat of our hearts it sparks
It takes us on a ride that we can't resist
A rollercoaster of emotions that persist
Love is a language that needs no words
It's a symphony that can be heard
It's a dance that we share in the night
A moment that feels so pure and right
Love is a gift that we give and take
It's the reason our hearts awake
It's the bond that ties us together
A love that lasts forever and ever
So cherish the love that you have found
Let it grow and spread all around
Let it fill your heart with joy and grace
And let it shine upon your face.
Two hearts beat as one,
Joined in love's sweet embrace,
Together they stand,
In this holy, sacred place.
The bride, radiant in her beauty and grace,
The groom, handsome and strong,
Filled with love and a smiling face.
Their love, like a rose in bloom,
Fragrant and full of life,
As they exchange their vows,
Their hearts fill with delight.
The rings, symbols of their love,
A promise to never part,
As they embark on this journey,
With love in their hearts.
May their love grow stronger each day,
Through the joys and the strife,
May their bond never falter,
As they journey through life.
Congratulations to the newlyweds,
May your love forever shine bright,
May you cherish each other always,
As you walk hand in hand, in life.
Amidst the world of commerce and trade
Lies the foundation of our daily brigade
Economy, the heart of our monetary system
A complex structure that we can't help but listen
It's a web of transactions and values
Where supply and demand leads to venues
Where products are sold and services are bought
And every penny counts, or else it's for naught
The stock markets rise and fall like tides
And investors fear a recession that hides
Inflation and deflation are two sides of the coin
That can make or break a nation's join
The GDP is a measure of growth
But at times, it only reflects a mirage both
Unemployment rates can hit the roof
And bring the entire economy down with a woof
As we delve deeper into this world of money
We realize it's a system that's not funny
For it affects every aspect of our lives
From the way we eat to the roof over our heads and our drives
So let us learn to navigate this economic sea
And try to build a world that's free
From the shackles of poverty and strife
And where prosperity is a part of life.
In the darkness of night,
With only stars for light,
I wander through the trees,
Whispering secrets on the breeze.
The moon above shines bright,
A beacon in the night,
Guiding me on my way,
As I wander and sway.
The rustling of leaves,
A symphony that weaves,
Through the stillness of the air,
A melody beyond compare.
I lose myself in thought,
As I continue on my sought,
Journey through the dark,
A journey of the heart.
For in this silent space,
I find my inner grace,
And though the night may be long,
My spirit is forever strong.
So let the stars shine bright,
And guide me through the night,
For I am not alone,
In this world I call my own.
Amidst the woods and fields so green,
Nature's beauty can be seen.
From the chirping birds in the trees,
To the buzzing bees and gentle breeze.
The flowers bloom in rainbow hues,
And the leaves rustle with morning dews.
The sun shines bright and warms the land,
While the moon and stars glow on command.
The rivers flow with gentle grace,
And the oceans roar with a fierce embrace.
Mountains tower high in the sky,
And valleys dip low, where rivers run by.
Wildlife roams free in the land,
With beauty and grace at their command.
Deer that dart, and rabbits that hop,
And majestic eagles that soar and stop.
Nature's cycles, a wondrous sight,
From dawn's first light to the end of night.
From birth and growth, to age and decay,
It's a magnificent display day by day.
So let us cherish nature's gifts,
And protect it from harm and rifts.
For it is a treasure to behold,
A legacy worth preserving for all to behold.
Markets smile, deep pockets make fat pile,
And when frown, fortunes come tumbling down.
In play of plump coffers
There’s no place for paupers—
Sophomore Dumpty’s tend to crash crown,
They prosper that possess wile and guile.
_________________________________________
Happenings |24.12.2022| Humour, Sestet
Poet’s note: It was as if only yesterday Elon Musk was crowned the king of fortunes at top of the pile. Today, his net worth has dropped by $ 135 billion. The rest of the tech tsars also watch their net worth getting depleted. India’s Gautam Adani at $110 billion has risen to third place. From almost nowhere in sight now appears Louis Vaitton to claim first place at $ 159 billion. The sestet is set in anapaest meter, and a mirror-like rhyme scheme. What we have here is just a Sestet, not a Sestina.
Persian Rug
$6,000
dog bed
September 7, 1982
a date I shall always remember
for on that date, I met my fate
for eight years
I dreamt of meeting her
then she walked into my life.
six lines
bite size poetry contest
Introduction
By the third or fourth return of a familiar end-word, a reader begins to experience two impulses at once: recognition and suspense. The word is known, but its next meaning is not. That tension makes sestinas especially rewarding to read side by side. One poet may turn recurrence into obsession, another into ritual, comedy, argument, grief, or a patient deepening of imagery. The pleasure lies not merely in spotting the returns, but in hearing how context keeps changing their emotional weight.
As you read the community poems, notice the variety hidden inside a shared architecture. Some writers create a strong narrative that advances despite the circling vocabulary. Others favor meditation, allowing images and associations to gather around the chosen words. Voices may sound conversational, incantatory, dramatic, intimate, or deliberately restrained. Even poems using similarly ordinary end-words can differ sharply because syntax, tone, stanza turns, and line length determine whether repetition feels natural, ominous, playful, or claustrophobic.
Browsing multiple examples reveals possibilities that one isolated poem cannot. Compare how different poets manage the reader's growing awareness of the pattern, how they prevent recurrence from becoming mere echo, and how they approach the envoy as a final concentration rather than an administrative ending. Read beyond the first example and consider which poems make their repeated language feel inevitable. The collection becomes most instructive when each sestina is treated not as a template filled in, but as an individual negotiation between formal return and imaginative change.
Reading Guide
A useful way to read a sestina is to follow both its visible subject and its hidden argument with recurrence. Do not reduce the experience to checking whether the expected words appear. Instead, observe what happens to those words as the poem progresses: what they come to suggest, what pressures gather around them, and how the speaker's relationship to them changes. When comparing community poems, attend to the difference between repetition that merely confirms and repetition that revises what came before.
- Track each end-word's changing role. A repeated word may begin as a physical object and later acquire symbolic, emotional, or ironic force. This transformation is one of the form's richest resources. Ask: which poet gives the familiar word the most surprising new context without making the usage feel strained?
- Listen to the syntax before each return. The wording that leads into an end-word determines whether its arrival feels inevitable, delayed, abrupt, or engineered. Awkward inversions often reveal the machinery. Ask: does the sentence naturally desire its final word, or does it seem bent solely to accommodate it?
- Notice movement across stanzas. Recurring vocabulary can create circularity, but the poem still needs development. Look for changes in time, setting, knowledge, emotional temperature, or power. Ask: after each stanza, has the situation advanced, deepened, or been meaningfully reconsidered?
- Hear the secondary soundscape. Internal rhyme, consonance, vowel echoes, and rhythmic variation can prevent the end-word pattern from carrying the entire musical burden. Ask: how does each poet build sound within the lines, and does that music support the poem's tone?
- Map the image network. Strong sestinas often let images form relationships around the recurring words, so that separate details gradually belong to one imaginative world. Ask: which images return, mutate, or answer one another, and what emotional pattern do they create?
- Study the envoy's pressure. The shortened closing space intensifies every choice. It may resolve an argument, expose a contradiction, offer a distilled image, or refuse easy closure. Ask: does the ending merely gather required language, or does it alter how the preceding poem is understood?
As you browse the poems in this collection, compare not only correctness but consequence. The most revealing question is what the recurrence enables that a less patterned poem might not have discovered.
Writing Tips
Approach a sestina as a sustained act of discovery rather than a word-placement exercise. The form rewards material that can survive repeated examination: a memory that will not settle, a conflict with several sides, a place layered with time, or an object whose meaning changes according to who holds it. Before drafting, identify what must evolve. Recurrence supplies continuity; the poet must supply consequence.
- Choose material with genuine circular pressure. Subjects involving return, fixation, ritual, inheritance, waiting, or unresolved argument often benefit from language that comes back altered. If the subject naturally moves in a straight line toward a single revelation, the pattern may feel imposed rather than necessary.
- Select end-words for range, not decoration. Favor words that can enter different sentences, tones, and image systems. A useful set may combine concrete and abstract possibilities, varied sounds, and more than one grammatical function. Six equally grand abstractions can make every line sound announced rather than lived.
- Give each recurring word a developmental path. Sketch several possible contexts, senses, or emotional associations for every word. This is not a script; it is protection against repeating the same thought. Save at least one unexpected but credible use for late in the poem, when readers believe they know the vocabulary.
- Draft toward the line ending. Let each sentence generate a reason to arrive at its final word. Avoid writing a complete sentence and then distorting it to attach the required term. Strategic enjambment can loosen the pattern, but habitual inversion or filler phrases will expose formal compliance.
- Build stanza-level change. Decide what shifts each time: scene, speaker, time, addressee, evidence, or emotional understanding. Repetition becomes powerful when the surrounding situation refuses to remain static. A common beginner mistake is producing several polished paraphrases of one initial idea.
- Create music inside the lines. Because the terminal vocabulary is conspicuous, vary cadence and use subtle internal echoes to keep the poem acoustically alive. Too much additional chiming can make the pattern sing-song; too little may leave the returns sounding like isolated pegs.
- Protect the speaker's natural voice. Read each line as speech, even when the style is elevated or surreal. If a word choice exists only to satisfy placement, revise the whole sentence rather than defending the awkwardness. Formal ingenuity matters less than believable pressure behind the utterance.
- Prepare the ending before reaching it. The envoy should feel compressed by everything already said. It can crystallize, reverse, implicate the speaker, or leave a resonant uncertainty. Avoid treating it as a container into which leftover words must be packed; its brevity makes mechanical phrasing especially visible.
During revision, mark every recurrence and read the poem aloud twice: once while emphasizing the end-words, then again while trying not to emphasize them. The first reading tests semantic development and sound; the second reveals whether syntax and pacing remain natural. Cut explanatory lines that merely tell readers what repetition has already shown. Finally, check the intended pattern, but spend equal care on image precision, tonal turns, and whether the ending earns the reader's accumulated anticipation.
Interesting Facts
- A repeated word does not repeat a meaning automatically. Context can make the same term tender, threatening, comic, literal, or metaphorical. Much of the form's flexibility comes from this gap between verbal sameness and semantic change.
- The deeper difficulty is progression, not recurrence. A poet may place every expected word successfully while leaving the emotional situation unchanged. Memorable sestinas use the circular surface to measure movement beneath it.
- The architecture can be almost invisible in performance. Natural syntax and varied cadence may let listeners feel accumulating echoes before they consciously recognize the pattern. On the page, spacing and line endings make that design easier to inspect.
- Ordinary words can outperform conspicuously poetic ones. Flexible terms associated with rooms, bodies, weather, work, or conversation can enter many believable contexts. Highly specialized words may create intensity, but they can also narrow the poet's options too early.
- Reader anticipation becomes a compositional tool. Once a word has returned several times, its eventual arrival carries expectation. A poet can satisfy that expectation smoothly, delay it through syntax, or place it in a context that changes its emotional charge.
- The envoy need not provide conventional resolution. Its concentration may deliver a verdict, a final image, an ironic reversal, or a sharpened uncertainty. What matters is that compression produces consequence rather than merely demonstrating completion.
- Comparison reveals the form's range. As you read the community poems, notice how different writers balance visibility and concealment, narrative and meditation, or solemnity and play. Several interpretations show that shared constraints do not require shared effects.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and structure interact closely in a sestina because recurring language makes the reader revisit the same emotional or imaginative territory. The themes below are literary possibilities rather than a statistical ranking of the community collection. Each works when return itself contributes meaning rather than serving as ornament.
- Memory and grief. Repeated words can imitate the mind's return to a person, place, or unfinished moment. Their altered contexts show how remembrance changes even when its central images remain fixed.
- Love, distance, and longing. Desire often circles what it cannot possess or fully understand. Recurrence can embody persistence, while changes in tone distinguish devotion from idealization, resentment, or acceptance.
- Family and inheritance. Names, objects, sayings, rooms, and habits can pass through generations. A sestina can revisit such details from several viewpoints, revealing how one household vocabulary carries conflicting histories.
- Conflict and argument. Returning terms can behave like disputed evidence, acquiring different meanings in the mouths or thoughts of opposing voices. The form suits dramatic monologue as well as an internal debate in which certainty gradually weakens.
- Domestic routine. Meals, chores, bedtime, caregiving, and repeated journeys contain natural cycles. Carefully chosen end-words can expose affection, fatigue, power, or quiet change within actions that appear identical from day to day.
- Landscape, weather, and seasons. Recurrence can connect human perception with environmental cycles without making the setting merely decorative. The same image may register as shelter, warning, loss, or renewal as the poem develops.
- Confinement and obsession. The returning vocabulary can create productive claustrophobia, making readers feel the limits surrounding a speaker. Development is essential, however; pressure should intensify or transform rather than simply remain oppressive.
- Humor and absurdity. Expected returns can operate like delayed punch lines, especially when formal dignity meets mundane language. Comic sestinas still need escalation: each recurrence should complicate the situation rather than repeat the same joke.
Browse the poems in this collection with these possibilities in mind, then compare how community poets transform related subjects through different voices, images, and tonal turns. Similar themes can produce radically different experiences when the recurring words bear different kinds of pressure.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of a sestina is that its language returns while its poem must move. A technically recognizable draft can fulfill the pattern and still feel stationary; a memorable one makes each return register changed knowledge. The end-words become points of measurement. When a word first names an object, later exposes a fear, and finally complicates a judgment, structure participates in thought. The form then feels necessary because the subject itself cannot be understood in a single pass.
Strong poems also manage the reader's awareness of design. If every line loudly announces its destination, anticipation can become monotony. If the pattern is hidden too completely, the distinctive pressure may lose force. Skilled writing varies the approach: one return arrives through plain speech, another through enjambment, another through a shift in grammatical role or figurative context. Meanwhile, stanza-level changes ensure that recurrence occurs inside development. Editors notice when image, syntax, pace, and emotional movement cooperate, because the architecture then seems to generate discoveries rather than merely display discipline.
Common weaknesses usually arise from serving the pattern locally while neglecting the poem as a whole. Forced inversions may solve one line but damage the voice. Filler may preserve placement while weakening urgency. Predictable reuse can reduce resonant words to labels, and over-explanation can tell readers that meanings have changed instead of allowing context to demonstrate the change. Mechanical pacing is another risk: equally weighted stanzas can sound like six attempts at the same paragraph. The envoy is especially revealing. An ending that simply inventories familiar language confirms completion but offers little transformation.
Individuality survives the shared convention through choices no pattern can dictate: the social position of the speaker, the sharpness of observation, the texture of sentences, the scale of the imagery, the degree of humor, and the courage of the final turn. One poet may make recurrence sound ritualistic; another may use it to dramatize interruption or resistance. Comparing several community poems develops judgment because quality becomes visible through differences. Readers can distinguish structural accuracy from expressive necessity, graceful inevitability from clever convenience, and repetition that decorates a subject from repetition that reveals its deepest pressure.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on an idea of what the form can accomplish. Compare how poets handle recurring words, stanza-to-stanza movement, voice, and the concentrated ending. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a specific transformation, image, tonal shift, or moment of effective recurrence; precise responses help sustain serious literary conversation.
Then try writing a sestina of your own. Choose language capable of changing under pressure, revise until the pattern supports rather than controls the voice, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can add another meaningful point of comparison to the collection.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 333 poems presented as sestinas, providing ample opportunity to read beyond a single model and compare different artistic decisions. Some poets may closely follow established conventions, while others may adapt or challenge them in pursuit of a particular voice, subject, or effect. Browse with attention to both structure and consequence: the collection's value lies in seeing how many distinct poems can emerge from a shared pattern of return.
Sestina Categories
Read wonderful sestina poetry on the following sub-topics:
animals, family, flowers, friendship, funny, kids, life, love, music, nature, nursery, parents, school, soccer, spring, sports, war, winter
and more.
Definition | What is Sestina 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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