Hm, I like this. The rhyme and meter are both very clean, and the way the subsequent stanzas borrow consecutive lines from the first is a nice effect. Kind of like a pantoum, in a way, for how they change their meaning by being used in a new context. Most of it seems to talk to tolerance of gender identity, but the last one feels more like being kind in general. I could still buy it being a consequence of that, though, in that the former is an element of the latter. Nicely done.

I kind of like how this was constructed, but in the end, it feels less like there's an actual message and more like a mad lib. There's almost a story here, and if you could have made a coherent narrative out of it, I would have been impressed. Now, it's more like "here are some words it could have been saying," and it's harder to say there was as much artistry involved. It's a valid way to generate a prompt, but it almost puts more on the reader to invent the story than the poet. Maybe another tickle was in order?

Pretty much mirrors what Frost's famous poem says. Fits the haiku form well. Haiku are tricky, in that it's easy to write one, but it's hard to write one where it feels like every word is perfect and the whole thing stands out. For instance, the "hopeful" here feels like it's lacking context and thus doesn't really inform the rest. If I remove that, it still says what Frost did, and adding it back doesn't create any new meaning. It's not bad at all, just fine grains of looking for how to judge these, since they're all pretty good this round.

>>Pascoite

Thanks, Pasco:

And thanks, everyone who voted. The form's called a rondeau redouble', and it's become one of my favorites the past couple years. The prompt got me thinking about the expansion of the universe and from there to Dr. Martin Luther King's line about how “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” There are some things we maybe don't want to go back to, and with the universe expanding, here's hoping we can all keep expanding as well. :)

Mike