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Rowena Velasco Poem
2025 Poetry Marathon Mile 14 Contest
Sponsored by: Mark Toney
Contest Judged: 9/6/2025 12:49:00 PM
( 1st Place )
Written: September 04, 2025
They said the songbird
her wings twisted and torn
should quiet herself...
that the sky held no place
for the fragile or the worn.
Yet she kept a sky tucked inside her - a
place untouched by any hand.
At daylight she let her voice rise
and though her body stayed earthbound,
her song lifted past the edge of flight.
The wind slowed to listen,
branches bent nearer
and the horizon seemed to pause,
stirred by her willfulness .
Each note unlaced an old wound,
each chorus pushed against the walls
of a world that once turned her away.
Her feathers never mended,
yet her dream grew wide enough
to shelter every broken one who followed.
From her we understood:
reaching the sky
was never about wings at all.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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Rowena Velasco Poem
Your gaze speaks softly -
I love you without a sound,
heartbeats seal the vow.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2015
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Rowena Velasco Poem
The Ideals of Captain America
Sponsored by: Robert James Liguori
Contest Judged: 11/16/2025 9:43:00 AM
( 3rd Place )
Written: October 22, 2025
Courage is waking when the night won’t end…
walking into the day on tired feet.
It is the quiet choice to help someone
even when your own heart feels heavy.
It is speaking what is right
even if your voice trembles.
It is staying when everyone else leaves
holding hope in small, stubborn ways.
Courage wears no crown of glory.
It bleeds in the dirt beside the fallen,
it lifts the shield even when the arm grows weak,
it fights not for victory
but because it must.
Courage is not the hero in a story,
it is the hand you reach out to another,
the deep breath you draw,
the step you force yourself to take,
even when fear feels louder than hope.
It is the soft voice inside that says;
"one more step"
the stubborn heartbeat that refuses to yield -
the quiet rise after every fall,
even when no one is there to see you stand.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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Rowena Velasco Poem
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder Poetry Contest //Sponsored by: Crystol Woods
Contest Judged: 8/14/2025 5:19:00 AM
( 1st Place )
Written: August 07, 2025
They say stillness is absence, an empty space between worth noting,
but I have heard its melodies in the pre-dawn chapel where stillness reigned
and still the walls exhaled calm.
I have found stillness and not loneliness---
but in two hands clutching without speaking,
the heart knowing inside out
language would only raze.
Silence is like sunlight before it shines,
the tranquility after I sleep and
the reluctance before "I forgive you",
It grips what chaos cannot express--admiration, agony, dread.
Even when grieving and when at a loss for words,
calmness is at hand and says it all.
So let the world fill with echoes.
With clamor and vivid proclamations.
I will still turn up beauty.
In the lull between storms,
In the hush between instinct and doubt
In the sacred calmness, that hark,
Not to respond, but to understand.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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Rowena Velasco Poem
My chest keeps echoes no one hears,
what once was warm now sweeps as mist,
a weight unseen, too dense to lift.
Each crack leaves marks that melts
yet roots begin to breathe beneath the soil.
But where you bore, now empty lies,
a soul planted thin beneath the skies.
At early bright, I wear a stranger's smile.
At night, I drifts a lonely mile.
The roses died but the thorns still remain...
and the joy slipped out without a name.
I feel the yank to sink beneath,
to whisper words, my mouth won't speak.
My voice is dust, it melts to stone,
a quiet scream that dies alone.
You glimmer faint in twilight's haze,
a scar that kept from golden days.
I dream of us the way we were,
before the quiet did arise.
One truth remains through changing skies;
a trace of you that never dies.
No blade and no bleak could cut apart
the quiet thread that ties my heart.
Am I unmade or only veiled?
A gentle quiet where the glow feels lost,
no flare ignites and no I'll will takes carry.
Only a calm that meanders through the horizons.
Now rest plunges as starlight falls
a tender serene that softens all.
The spirit arise.
The tonnage gone.
The years melt their grip restrained.
The years vanish and the pain is gone
but something brighter lingers on.
In endless night,
the spirit glows-
a long life ends yet deeper grows.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2015
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Rowena Velasco Poem
Good Sense Of Humour Blunts The Sharp Blades Of Reality Poetry
Contest //Sponsored by: Natasha L. Scragg
Contest Judged: 8/30/2025 4:27:00 AM
( 2nd Place )
Written: August 5, 2025
When life threw me a curveball,
I stumbled—then chuckled mid-fall.
Lumped knees, not pride, I wore like bent,
because sneering is something I've seen.
In chemo rooms and vestibules,
I frenzied dry jokes on aseptic walls.
Doctors simpered, nurses would beam—
a punch-line where the fear had been.
When agony thumped hard and sleep grew thin,
I let the silly light writhe in.
A meme, a whirl , a silly song—
made aching days feel less so long.
No, humour incurable or patch,
But it's the ally, not made to part.
It doesn't silence, hurt or truth,
but let me smirk with my aching tooth.
So here's my laugh, though life gushes beneath,
it's how I rise, not how I lament!
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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Rowena Velasco Poem
2025 Poetry Marathon Mile 19
Sponsored by: Mark Toney
Contest Judged: 10/3/2025 1:17:00 PM
( 1st Place )
Written: September 27, 2025
No one calls her name
past the silent edge of her house.
No family voice calls her name.
The house is bare,
The quiet coils around her chest
heavy as a winter frost.
Empty shelves murmur back her longing.
No bread, no work,
only the rasp of breath stitching the silence
to measure the day.
The table bears a chair no one will fill…
she keeps it there
though no one comes.
It listens when she cannot speak,
it holds her secrets while the world looks past.
She cannot speak;
the streets do not bend to hear her grief.
People move past like shadows,
her sorrow clinging to the chill air,
her need folding into the city’s pulse.
Under the cloak of darkness...
she reaches for a mother long gone,
the hands that once held storms at bay,
the lullabies that stitched the dark
with tenderness.
Now even memory aches like an open wound.
And still—
each morning she rises,
pulls her body from the weight of despair,
plants her soles on the frost of morning
and begins again.
Not because it is easy,
not because someone will notice,
but because life…
even in its harshest silence…
demands she endure.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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Rowena Velasco Poem
September Sestet (SS) Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Andrea Dietrich
Contest Judged: 9/29/2025 12:00:00 AM
( 1st Place )
September drapes an amber veil on the fields…
and shadows crawl slowly across the grass.
I breathe the crisp air, half sweet, half sad
and watch the geese wobble across the pale blue sky.
Summer slips away without a sound,
and autumn waits at the gate like an old friend.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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Rowena Velasco Poem
2025 Poetry Marathon Mile 20 Contest
Sponsored by: Mark Toney
Contest Judged: 10/8/2025 11:24:00 A
( 4th Place )
Written: October 4, 2025
Storms arrive without warning,
flames snapping around us.
We move through the ruins,
our hands brushing as we go.
We are sparks scattered across the dark;
each one reaching
to bring warmth to another.
A hand that lingers, a voice that leans close,
a look that holds you, really sees you
the quiet comfort of being noticed.
I remember a girl
with empty pockets,
hope tucked quietly inside her chest.
she wandered from doorway to doorway,
asking for a few coins,
her voice soft and steady.
above her, her dreams glimmered
like lanterns guiding her through the dark.
I hold your hand when I can,
listen with my heart,
give what little kindness I have,
so someone can rise a little higher.
It is the tide that lifts a drowning soul…
the bridge whispered across an empty street,
the pulse that says:
You are seen. You are worthy.
You can keep moving.
Let us lift each other up,
so no one stays alone in the dark.
Let humble gestures drift like seeds.
Even in the fiercest storm,
we hold hands
and keep walking forward.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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Rowena Velasco Poem
The glass once lucid
now deflects glow differently.
A chuckle clenched in the wind,
blanching and flaming.
Where were we?
Footprints echo, retreat, advance
sagging floor, missing nails.
Not long enough--
like a wheeze folding in and out,
a beam of light held in a still moment.
Sagging floor, nails missing,
steps forth, then retreat.
Where were we,
blanching and flaming,
a chuckle loosed in the wind—
now the glass, no longer lucid,
deflects the glow differently.
Copyright © Rowena Velasco | Year Posted 2025
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