Diwali Poetry: Writing About Light Without the Cliches
A contest judge on why most Diwali poems read like greeting cards, the five images that have been used too many times, and how to write about the festival of lights in a way that earns its brightness.
Every year in late October or early November, the submissions pile fills with Diwali poems. I have judged four years of them now, and I can tell you that roughly one in twelve is worth reading past the first stanza. The rest fall into a pattern so predictable I could write the template myself: diyas glowing in the dark, rangoli colours bright as a rainbow, families gathered in warm embrace, sweets passed from hand to hand, and a closing line about light triumphing over darkness. The images are not wrong. They are just exhausted. A judge who has read six hundred Diwali poems does not need another diya.
The problem is not the subject. Diwali is a festival built on genuine poetic material: the return from exile, the victory of a specific good over a specific evil, the act of lighting a lamp against a darkness you could simply endure instead. These are permanent themes. The problem is that most poets reach for the festival's official imagery kit instead of the festival's actual experience. The kit is what the greeting card industry uses. The experience is what you lived.
The Five Exhausted Images
- The row of diyas. Every Diwali poem has them. They line a windowsill or a doorstep or a corridor, and they glow, and the poem tells you they glow. What the poem almost never does is tell you what it was like to fill them with oil, to adjust the wick, to light one from another, to smell the ghee burning, to find the one that keeps going out. The diya is not an image. It is an object. Describe the object, not the glow.
- The rangoli as a rainbow. Rangoli is not a rainbow. It is made of specific powders, applied with specific fingers, in a specific pattern that someone in your family probably taught you. Which colours. Which pattern. Whose hands. The poem lives in those details, not in the word "vibrant."
- The firecracker as joy. Firecrackers are not universally joyful. They are loud, they frighten animals, they fill the street with smoke, and the children who light them are often more nervous than happy. A poem that admits the complexity of a firecracker is more honest than one that treats it as a punctuation mark for celebration.
- The family gathered. Not every family gathers perfectly. Some people are missing. Some chairs are empty. Some conversations are strained. The poem that acknowledges the absence at the Diwali table is more powerful than the one that pretends everyone is present.
- Light versus darkness. This is the festival's official theme, and it is true as a story, but as a poem it has been said so many times that it has lost its edge. A better approach: write about a specific darkness and a specific light. Not darkness in general. The darkness of a particular room, a particular year, a particular fear. Not light in general. The light of one lamp, lit by one person, for one reason.
What Actually Works in a Diwali Poem
The best Diwali poem I ever scored was by a poet in Pune who wrote about the morning after. Not the night of the festival, but the morning after, when the diyas had burned out, the rangoli had been half walked through, and the street was covered in paper and ash. The poem was about cleaning up. It was about what remains after the light has done its work and gone. It scored 87 out of 100, and it is still the highest-scoring Diwali poem I have read.
Another strong entry came from a teenager in Bangalore who wrote about Diwali during the pandemic. No guests, no firecrackers, just her mother lighting a single diya on the balcony of their flat and the two of them standing there watching it. The poem did not mention Rama, Sita, or the victory of light. It mentioned the sound of the city being quieter than it had ever been, and the smallness of one flame on a concrete railing.
Three Exercises for Diwali Week
- The morning after. Write a poem set on the day after Diwali. What is left. What has been cleaned. What has not.
- One diya. Write an entire poem about a single lamp. Where it sits, what it is made of, who lit it, what it illuminates, what it does not reach. No other lamps in the poem. Just one.
- The absence. Write a Diwali poem about someone who is not there. Do not say they are missed. Describe the space they would have occupied. Let the reader feel the absence through the shape of what is empty.
What to Do With Your Draft
If one of these exercises produces something worth keeping, the contest window is open. You can submit your poem here. Every entry is judged blind, which means I will not know it is a Diwali poem until I read the words. I will not know your name, your city, or your background. I will only see the poem, and the poem is what I score across five criteria: creativity, emotion, structure, language, and impact and resonance.
If you want more starting points, our Diwali prompt collection and our Diwali poetry theme guide has ideas that avoid the five exhausted images above. And if you are writing in Hindi, the contest accepts poems in any language, judged in their original language without translation. Write the Diwali you actually experienced, not the one the greeting card shows you. The real festival is always more interesting than the official version.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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