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Poem in a chosen form on your subject

Write a polished poem in a specific form such as sonnet, haiku, villanelle or free verse, with fresh imagery and an explanation of choices.

Change note: Initial version

Prompt

Write an original poem about {{subject}}.

Form: {{form}}
Mood: {{mood}}
Point of view and voice: {{voice}}
Image or detail I would like included: {{detail}}

Requirements:
- Follow the form's real rules (meter, rhyme scheme, syllable count, line count, refrains) as precisely as the form demands. If the form is free verse, give it deliberate line breaks and rhythm.
- Use concrete, sensory images. Avoid cliches such as "heart of gold", "tears like rain" and generic abstractions. Do not explain the emotion; show the moment that creates it.
- Choose words for sound as well as sense.
- Give the poem a title.

Output:
1. The poem
2. A short note (3 to 4 sentences) on how it meets the form and one or two craft choices
3. One alternative closing line or couplet that takes the poem in a different direction

Write only original work and do not quote or imitate any specific existing poem.

Variables

  • {{subject}}Subjecttext

    Default: The last morning in a childhood home

  • {{form}}Formselect

    Options: Sonnet (Shakespearean), Sonnet (Petrarchan), Villanelle, Haiku sequence, Free verse, Limerick, Ballad, Ghazal

    Default: Villanelle

  • {{mood}}Moodtext

    Default: Quiet, bittersweet

  • {{voice}}Voicetext

    Default: First person, adult looking back

  • {{detail}}Detail to includetext

    Default: A pencil-marked height chart on a doorframe

Example output

**Doorframe**

The pencil lines climb up the kitchen wall,
each year a small stair cut into the wood.
Tomorrow strangers hang their coats in the hall.

I tape the last box shut. It looks so small.
The house keeps every thing it never could:
the pencil lines climb up the kitchen wall.

My brother's mark is crooked. He would stall,
rising on his toes the way he stood.
Tomorrow strangers hang their coats in the hall.

Mother wrote our names in a hand I recall,
pressed hard, as though the numbers understood:
the pencil lines climb up the kitchen wall.

The paint will cover every year, every scrawl,
and I will not argue. I never would.
Tomorrow strangers hang their coats in the hall.

I measure nothing now. I only stall,
and press my crown to the grain where once I stood.
The pencil lines climb up the kitchen wall.
Tomorrow strangers hang their coats in the hall.

**Note:** Nineteen lines in five tercets and a closing quatrain, with the first refrain returning at the end of stanzas two, four and six and the second at the end of stanzas three, five and six, as a villanelle requires. The A rhyme (wall, hall, small, stall, recall, scrawl) alternates with the B rhyme (wood, could, stood, understood, would). The refrains shift from description to farewell as the speaker's context changes, and the height chart stays the one concrete object.

**Alternative closing:** "I measure nothing now. I just stay tall."

Notes

Naming the form and the mood together keeps the model from drifting into generic rhyme. If a form constraint is slipping, ask it to count syllables line by line and fix any misses.

Poem in a chosen form on your subject (v1) | LazyPrompt