Hair
It grows, greys, tangles and outlasts us: the body's own archive.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about hair: braids, inheritance and identity, with craft techniques, mistakes to avoid and prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Hair is the body's most public material and its most intimate. Strangers judge it in a second, yet the rituals around it, the combing, oiling, braiding and cutting, happen close to the scalp, often at the hands of someone who loves us. A poem about hair is rarely about hair. It is about inheritance, a daughter wearing her mother's curls; about identity, the first grey strand found at thirty; about power, who is told their hair is unprofessional and by whom. Few subjects carry so much culture in so little material.
Hair also has a strange relationship with time. It keeps growing, keeps recording, and it survives: locks kept in envelopes, in lockets, in the back pages of family Bibles. Victorians wove mourning jewellery from the hair of the dead. When a poet picks up this subject, they are handling one of the few parts of the body that can genuinely be kept.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose hair because it makes abstract themes touchable. Ancestry becomes a braid, rebellion becomes a shaved head, grief becomes a hairbrush no one can throw away. The theme rewards specific cultural knowledge, and judges notice: in a contest scored on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, as Writory's monthly prize is, a hair poem grounded in one family's particular rituals almost always outperforms a general meditation on beauty.
Where it comes from
Alexander Pope built The Rape of the Lock, a whole mock epic, around one stolen curl, proof that hair could carry epic weight as early as 1712. Yeats wrote of a young woman whose yellow hair kept men from seeing her true self, turning hair into a question about whether anyone is loved for themselves alone. In the twentieth century, Black American poets made hair a site of pride and politics: Gwendolyn Brooks praised natural hair in an era that demanded straightening, and later poets have written the salon and the barbershop as places of community, gossip and survival.
The elements that carry it
- Combs, brushes, oils and ribbons: the tools of hair are small heirlooms, heavy with the hands that used them.
- Braiding scenes carry rhythm and lineage at once, one person's hands in another's hair, generation to generation.
- Grey strands, receding lines and thinning crowns measure time more gently than any clock image.
- Cut hair on a floor, in a sink, in an envelope, marks endings: chemotherapy, mourning, enlistment, fresh starts.
- Texture words, coil, frizz, silk, wire, straw, give the reader's fingers something to feel.
Techniques that work
- Set the poem inside a ritual: the Sunday oiling, the barbershop queue, the pre-wedding braiding. Ritual gives you structure for free.
- Tell a life through haircuts: five stanzas, five cuts, from first trim to hospital shave, and let the gaps between them do the storytelling.
- Use the cut as your volta. The moment scissors close is a natural turn, and everything after it belongs to a different self.
- Let sound mirror texture: tight, clicking consonants for coils and knots, long liquid vowels for hair coming loose.
- Write the inheritance line: whose hair does the speaker have, and what else came with it?
Mistakes to avoid
- Shampoo-advert language: silken tresses, cascading locks. Fix it with the true words, frizz, kink, cowlick, split ends.
- Treating hair as mere decoration. In most lives it is politics, religion, money and memory; find which one your poem is really about.
- Borrowing another culture's hair rituals for exotic flavour. Write the rituals you know, or research until you could pass a stranger's scrutiny.
- Cutting hair for grief in the last stanza because poems do that. Earn it: show what the hair held before you show it falling.
An exercise
List every person who has ever cut, washed or braided your hair. Choose the one who surprises you most on the list and write a poem set entirely during one session in their hands, keeping your eyes at scalp level.
A challenge
Write two companion poems: one from the point of view of someone about to lose their hair, to age, illness or choice, and one from the point of view of the person who will sweep it up.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about finding a single hair, on a pillow, in a book, on a coat, that belongs to someone who is gone, and what you do with it.
Before you submit
- The hair described has a specific texture, colour and history, not a generic shine.
- At least one tool, a comb, a ribbon, clippers, appears and carries weight.
- The poem knows what hair means in this particular family or culture.
- Any cutting scene is prepared for, not sprung on the reader for easy emotion.
- The ending resists tidy transformation; a haircut changes a day, not usually a soul.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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