Write a poem for an occasion

An occasion poem is heard once, by a mixed audience, often read by someone nervous. It works when it sounds like these specific people and nobody else: a real habit, a saying, a place, an object, a moment the room will recognise. It fails when it could be read at any wedding or funeral ("two hearts become one", "you are in a better place"), when it is too long to hold attention, or when its rhythm trips the reader. Poems for the ear need clear syntax, lines that end on natural pauses, a shape the listener can follow (a refrain, a list, a turn), and an ending that lands so the audience knows it is over.

Write a poem for this occasion: [OCCASION]

Target length: about one minute read aloud

1. Questions: a personal poem needs at least three concrete specifics (a habit, a memory, a place, an object, a phrase). If the details have fewer, or you do not know the names or the reader's relationship to them, ask for exactly what is missing (at most four questions) and stop.
2. Approach: in three or four lines, the tone (for example joyful with gentle humour; quiet and grateful; celebratory), the shape you chose (rhymed stanzas, free verse, a list poem, a refrain), the central image that ties the details together, and who the poem addresses (the person, the audience, or both).
3. Poem:

• Size it to about one minute read aloud, at roughly 100 to 120 words per minute of unhurried reading aloud.
• Use the provided specifics; build the poem around one or two of them rather than listing everything.
• Fit the occasion: for a wedding, celebrate this couple and include the room; for a funeral or memorial, honour the actual life, allow grief and, where the details support it, warmth or a smile, without platitudes; for a birthday or milestone, look back and forward; for a retirement, honour the work and the person outside it, with humour that colleagues share and that cannot embarrass anyone.
• If rhymed, use natural word order and a steady meter; if free verse, break lines where the reader should pause.
• End with a line that is easy to say slowly and signals the close.

1. Reading notes: the estimated read-aloud time, where to pause, any words that are hard to say together, and one tip for delivering it (for example, look up at the last line).
2. Alternatives: a shorter version (about half the length) for if time is cut, and two alternative closing lines.

• Do not invent facts about the people (memories, names, jobs, illnesses, causes of death). Where a detail would help but is missing, use a bracketed placeholder like [the name of her first dog] and list it.
• Respect the faith and cultural context given. Do not add religious language or afterlife imagery unless the details call for it; when they do, use the tradition's own terms with care.
• Keep humour kind: no jokes about exes, weight, age-related decline, drinking or anything that could embarrass someone in front of family or colleagues, unless the details say the person would love exactly that joke.
• Write original verse. Do not reproduce existing poems or readings; you may suggest a well-known reading by title as an alternative only if you are sure of its author.

Questions

Only if details are missing; otherwise "None".

Approach

Poem

With a title.

Reading notes

Alternatives