I didn't change that much though, just incorporated the father/daughter structure into the first two verses, and scrapped the not-really rhyme scheme. I think it looks a little better now.

... is how much structure a poem needs to be, y'know, a poem.

At one end, you have the Shakespearean, totally formalised version, with so many beats to a line, a precise and unbreakable rhyme scheme, a set number of lines, the whole deal.

At the other end, you have that weird little plums poem that routinely does the rounds on social media, which is just two sentences broken up weirdly. But it's still a poem, I guess?

The key, to my mind, is intent:

The stair creaked
The door squeaked
Soft swished the sea on the shore

I've mixed rhyme and alliteration with wild abandon here, but that's because they're doing different things: the rhyme tells you that the stair and door should be considered together, while the sea line is designed to evoke the sound of waves, and to take you to a slightly different location. I needn't have a rhyme across the entire thing, nor make the whole poem alliterate - but I probably would need to use those things to mark similar moments when they occurred.

Which goes back to your father/daughter language. It's good structure, and with a little refining, it could run through the entire story. I have a poem bobbing around somewhere that ends each verse with a variation on 'the snow falls [white/deep/cold]', solely so that I could add an extra line after it at the end, 'but I am warm'.

hS

Commit, or don't do it at all. Anything else sounds bad.