I am in.

I would have been in... I thought today was the last day for submitting!

The honeybee here is the Unknown Soldier, and the poem a little like a letter we might write to them, never to be read; it reflects our own sense of impending history.

The line with "daughters of Adria" is the most evocative, but seems a little out of place in a piece which seems to address itself to evolution. I tried to discover what might have been meant by it, but the nearest counterpart I could find was a city of the same name, which sits on a buried town from antiquity.

Nice imagery here with colors running into the lake, then blending with a cup of tea. It describes the kind of "action" a mood can have on us; only, by the last line, the speaker does not seem too impressed!

Hmm. An alternate timeline? Abounding with humorous notes, though I am wondering what it is the speaker is looking at which gives them toward this fanciful speculation (since it deals with a discrete subject), and just who this amber-encrusted quack is, anyway.

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.

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.

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.

>>Heavy_Mole
>>Pascoite

Thanks, folks:

I forgot all about this till just now. It needs another run through the word processor as they say--the first person narrator shjowing up at the end took me completely by surprise as I was writing, for instance--but I think there's something here worth poking at.

Mike