I'm not sure whether this is serious about squirrels banding together to attack humans or tongue-in-cheek about how they often fry themselves on electrical lines. Either way, the rhyme and meter are constructed very well, the only minor thing being that "squirrel" can be heard as either one or two syllables. Might one of these squirrels possibly be a sorceress? :-)

Hm, it does what the title says it'll do, and it's interesting to see the follow-through on each. Though some sound derogatory while others sound complimentary, so I can't tell what tone it's taking. Or if it's trying to do both, it might need a tweak to make that explicitly clear. Cool idea as a concept piece.

You've got the right syllable counts, but it's harder to tell since it doesn't maintain a meter. I hope you weren't trying for a meter, because if so, it's forced in beyond recognition. Rhymes are a bit loose in places.

This reminds me a bit of the old Simpsons episode where Bart joins up with a revival preacher, who tries to get Bart to behave, and Bart says he can always just do that right before he dies. The preacher thoughtfully says the deathbed confession is a pretty good angle.

I like the earnestness here. There's a nice plaintive quality.

And I guess the rules changed so that you can use your own picture if it's the only possibility?

Sorry, I completely forgot there was an original round going and I never voted. At least I can still leave a comment.

I like the idea here. A few minor editing issues. It's a bit rushed, and it feels like it skips two important steps. First, this astronaut learning to communicate with the natives. It just happens instantaneously, and possibly the nanomachines can essentially instantly learn his language and translate, but they why'd it take so long for her to teach them how to write it? And why are they so sympathetic to help her carve her message when it never occurred to them to do it on their own behalf? My first guess is that this is the entirety of their civilization, so there's nobody to warn, but they already acknowledged the risk to other races, so why not try to warn them as well? And second, that this is such a personal message. I had mixed feelings about that. I do understand her desire to write it, but she didn't expect her daughter would be the one coming to search for her, so it'd be indirect. I also assume they have FTL available or she was never going to see her daughter again anyway (and would have ample time to write the message—for that matter, won't she have to keep maintaining it so it doesn't erode away before they see it?). Good use of the prompt and handling of the mood.

Since the last two lines of the second stanza rhyme, that has me looking for a rhyme scheme, but there doesn't seem to be an intent for one. The rhythm works fine.

As to what is happening... I have no idea. There are plays on candy names, some of which I get and some of which I don't, but the overall effect is that there's a hidden joke that's going completely over my head. I really don't know what to make of this.

So... I like the mood of this, and the language use was good. But I'm lost on several fronts. One, only the longer stanzas have a rhyme scheme, and only in that they end with two couplets. I'm no scholar of poetic forms, so I wouldn't know if this is a traditional one, but it seems closer to free verse, or at least close to blank verse, as the lines are all iambic tetrameter. I spent so much time looking to see what rhyme scheme there might be that I got distracted from the actual poetry. Like the previous one I read, the meter has one hiccup that relies on a word, "fire," that can be heard as two different syllable counts. I think it's more common to use it as one syllable, but it has to be two to fit the meter. Excusable enough, but you play it both ways: the second time you use the word, it has to be one syllable to fit the meter. Well, plus "wilderness" is kind of wedged into the meter, as you normally wouldn't stress the final syllable of it when speaking.

As to meaning... I get that the speaker finds a burned-out house in the woods and muses on how it fits with its environs. That part was fine. But the ending seemed to be making a point out of that, yet what it was saying went over my head.

Nicely done in structure. The only hiccup I had was that I normally hear "peculiar" as 4 syllables, where it needs 3 to fit the meter. Other than that, the rhymes, meter, and repetition all work great, and that's a tougher stress pattern to write in. I'm a little less clear on the meaning. The speaker definitely feels like his dedication to his work is less than that of the termites, though I don't know whether it's strictly a work ethic thing or if he finds their constructions artistically pleasing as well, more so than his own work.

I like the idea of guilty gorging on Halloween candy after the day, and most of the poem spoke to that fine, but the "no longer keen" felt wedged in. I didn't get what that line was saying. Rhymes all work fine, but there's no meter, if one was intended. Cute enough for a quick read.

Given the title, I assume that names the poetical form. While I've heard of it, i don't know its rules. The rhythm is steady, and amphibrachs aren't the easiest to use. Ah, and the rhymes repeat, so only three for a poem of this length. That makes word choice tough, but you managed it well. Does a ballade use repeated last lines like this? It puts me in the mind of something like a villanelle. If I hazard a guess to meaning, it's that modern culture of filing to and from work and having our attention constantly on our computers/phones makes us little better than simple insects from millions of years ago. Not the clearest meaning of this batch of entries, but the construction is the most impressive.

Tough call, as all three entries are ones i could see as good enough to win any given write-off, though here they are against each other.

I like the conflation of leaf-drop to making tea. The rhymes all work well enough, but the rhythm is a bit odd here and there, like needing "smile" and "boils" to be two syllables, or the stress patterns of "glorious" and "and the mixture" being a little forced. It carries on about the leaves long enough that it feels like it's making a point, only for the narrator to decide he doesn't care and decline to draw a conclusion from it. And maybe that's the intended feeling. If so, I guess I understand why, but it does leave it as if it was on the verge of doing something only to leave it incomplete. To elaborate a bit, I've seen other pieces where such a narrator gives an implied shrug and shoos away the potential philosophical thought brewing in his head, but then some reason is given for it, like the worldly cares that need his attention. Without that but, this felt dismissive on principle, and that's what's not quite clicking with me as to why. For form, this appears to be a type of sonnet, though I'm not great at remembering the different versions.

Seems to be about an insect trapped in amber, appropriately enough for the prompt, but it was apparent enough without knowing the prompt. No structure to speak of, but I like the language here. You'd make me go look up what the reference to Adria meant, but the rest was clear. Free verse is kind of tricky to make impressive. It inherently takes less effort, but then it also doesn't get the odd turns of language required to compress words into certain rhythms and rhymes, so it can flow more naturally. But it also almost never feels like the way it's organized carries any meaning, so I'm left wondering whether the choice of where to break lines or start new stanzas is supposed to convey something I'm missing. Like if it was written as prose, does it lose any of its meaning? And maybe shaping it in a way that it's not obviously prose gets the reader to think about it in a more abstract form? It's kind of maddening at times, since I've been on both sides, feeling like I'm not getting so much out of free verse, but also being disappointed when putting a lot of effort into it that people are more dismissive of it.

Anyway, I've wandered far off the point.

Despite the possibility that it was easier to write this way, I still found it an interesting and pleasant read.

>>Baal Bunny
You'd think Roger would check that area for problems, but he typically won't unless you @ him.

The rhymes work fine, and there doesn't seem to be an intended meter. It reads more like a set of instructions, so if there's supposed to be more to it than that, I'm missing it. With one arm up, I guess the figure is waving? Cute enough for a short piece.

A lot of this went over my head. I get that it's someone who once got a gift of a telescope who didn't have some huge interest in it at the time but who later enjoyed it and now has once more lost interest. Given the title, I'll guess the theme is that aging makes you lose your wonder? I don't get the prompt tie, unless the internal rhyme on the first line of each stanza means I'm to take that as two lines so each stanza has seven. The rhymes work well, though the meter takes some liberties here and there. I wish I understood more of it, because I like the mood it strikes.

Irregular meter: 8, 4, 8, 5, 8, 5, 4. I can't tell if the change between 5 and 4 is deliberate or if you just weren't being careful with the meter. There's definitely a plausible pattern. No problems with the rhyme. Given the prompt, of course everyone's writing 7-line poems. As to meaning, I think it has something to do with holding on to hope even when there doesn't seem to be any. A time-worn theme, but still a nice sentiment.

Ah, the different ways of notating numbers. I recall in Belgium they had a quirky way of writing 1, which even more necessitated differentiating the 7. Nothing too deep here, but a nice commentary on the ambiguities of writing that's hard to tell apart. Odd choice to have the 5th line not rhyme with anything. The rest is flawless rhyme and meter.

This flies a little over my head, but I think it's personifying galaxies and talking about the rise of entropy and the heat death of the universe? It maybe feels a little long, though I see what you were going for in the structure as it relates to the prompt: 7 stanzas of 7 lines each. The ABABCBC rhyme scheme goes off without a hitch, and the meter is there. I think I'm more impressed by it adhering to that structure than by the plot itself. The most interesting parts are where you cash in the personification full-bore and have them going to bars and bazaars, while the rest feels more detached.

Regularly ten syllables per line, but with no meter or rhyme (the rhyming 3rd and 4th lines are deceptive in making it seem like there will be a rhyme scheme). It seems more about a narrative about the creative process without there being a message, but maybe it links the pen's action to the mind's action. Still, feels more slice of life to me, but the language is pleasant to read.

The first stanza had great rhyme and meter, as long as you move that "can" from the fourth line up to the third. Then is starts to break down into free verse, and I assume it's intentional. The next two lines don't rhyme, the next two do, the next to have a self-rhyme, and none of this has any meter. If there's a meaning I'm supposed to get from that, it's going over my head. Maybe that the first takes a lot more editing to get right and so had better be written in pencil to facilitate that? And that when unconstrained, you don't worry about the permanency of ink since there's nothing to edit? That's what I get from it, I guess.

>>Forcalor
Not really a slope, no. More of a cliff, but that's also well down the list of definitions people will know. I've never heard it used this way.

You're going to use a very nonstandard definition for a very ordinary word where the context is unclear, be prepared for it to be misunderstood.

A journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step, huh?

I don't know if the first pair of lines did this on purpose, but I like the way the oddball word ending line one rhymes with the middle of line 2 before settling in to the pattern of each stanza having the same rhyme end every line. There's no meter.

Pretty good. This stuck with me the most.

Kind of a meta thing about storytelling, I guess? A bit of a structural puzzle. Each line is one word longer than the previous until it backs off to 5 again and stays there, but I don't know if that's deliberate. At first, it seemed to be thematic with the first couple of lines.

Everything about this went over my head. Was "steep" in the first line supposed to be "step"? As near as I can figure, someone's carrying something up a hill and has become somewhat of a spectacle to those watching, but I don't know what he's carrying or why. The last line of each stanza has a rhyme on the second-last word, but I don't know what "prowess" is doing there. In the first stanza, I was on board with it being female rhyme, but then the rest of the stanzas trim that extra syllable from the first line only, and I can't figure out what the structure is supposed to be, or what "prowess" even means in this context.

No idea what's going on here from the narrative side or the structural side.

Nice narrative about people minding their own health for the effect it has on the other. I do like when poetry doesn't necessarily have the rhymes occur at natural pause points. The rhymes themselves are fine here, but there's no meter. Not a bad starter for my slate.