Luck
Coins, dice and near misses: write the god nobody worships but everybody bargains with.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about luck: chance imagery, craft techniques, cliches to avoid, plus exercises and writing prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Luck is destiny's disreputable cousin: consequence without design, the raw fact that lives are made and unmade by dice nobody is holding. Where a destiny poem senses a pattern, a luck poem stares at the absence of one, at the lottery of birthplaces, the swerve that missed, the tumour that didn't. Writing luck honestly means resisting the urge to smuggle meaning back in. The theme's power is precisely that the coin does not care how it lands.
Yet people behave as if it can be courted, and that behaviour is the theme's richest seam. Poems about luck are full of ritual: the lucky shirt, the salt over the shoulder, the lottery numbers built from grandchildren's birthdays, the touched wood. Every superstition is a small poem already, an attempt to negotiate with randomness, and a poet who watches those negotiations closely, with tenderness rather than mockery, will never run out of material.
Why poets return to it
Poets write about luck because it is the unacknowledged author of so much we call merit or fate. Being born here rather than there, meeting this person on this platform, walking away from the crash: chance decides more than effort does, and poetry is one of the few places that admission can be made without despair. Thomas Hardy went further in his early poem 'Hap', wishing there were at least a vengeful god to blame, and finding something worse: pure 'crass casualty', dice-throwing time, indifference all the way down.
The theme also invites gratitude of an unusual, unsentimental kind: not thanks to anyone, but astonishment at having been missed by so many bullets.
Where it comes from
The Romans built Fortuna a wheel, and medieval poets kept it spinning: kings on top, beggars beneath, everyone rotating. The Carmina Burana manuscripts open with verses lamenting Fortune's turning wheel, monstrous and empty. Hardy's 'Hap' gave the theme its bleak modern grammar in 1866, and the ballad and blues traditions have always been luck's home registers, the 'if it wasn't for bad luck' complaint sung across centuries and continents.
In the twentieth century, Wisława Szymborska became the theme's great modern anatomist: her poem on surviving, often translated as 'Could Have', is a litany of near misses, saved because a nail, a minute, a millimetre intervened, and it shows how a list, plainly delivered, can carry more terror and gratitude than any philosophy.
The elements that carry it
- Small instruments of chance: coins, dice, cards, raffle tickets, scratched foil, the lottery kiosk's light.
- Charms and rituals: horseshoes, clover, spilled salt, crossed fingers, the lucky garment worn to every interview.
- Near misses: the swerve, the cancelled flight, the step not taken, luck most visible in what almost happened.
- The wheel and the weather: Fortuna's ancient emblem, and rain or sun arriving on the one day it mattered.
- Thresholds of the ordinary: doorways, platforms, queues, junctions, the places where one life quietly forks from another.
Techniques that work
- Write the near-miss litany: a Szymborska-style list of the accidents that failed to happen to your speaker, in flat, unadorned declaratives.
- Follow one charm through a life, a rabbit's foot, a lucky coin, and let its owner's faith in it rise and fall with events.
- Use plain, reportorial tone for enormous strokes of chance; understatement is luck's native register.
- Set two strangers side by side, same platform, same storm, different outcomes, and refuse to explain the difference.
- Interrogate the word itself: let the poem test 'lucky' against 'spared', 'random', 'unearned', and watch the speaker flinch at the honest one.
Mistakes to avoid
- Moralising luck into deserving: the good rewarded, the lazy punished. Fix: keep the dice blind; that blindness is the theme.
- Cataloguing superstitions as quaint decoration. Fix: attach each charm to a person who genuinely needs it, and the quaintness burns off.
- Casino imagery from films rather than life. Fix: find chance where you actually live, waiting lists, housing ballots, weather, biopsies.
- Ending on 'I guess I'm just lucky'. Fix: end on the near miss itself, rendered so concretely the reader's own luck prickles.
An exercise
List seven accidents, illnesses, meetings or losses that almost happened to you but did not, each in one plain sentence beginning 'It could have'. Arrange them from smallest to largest, cut any sentence with an adjective in it, and let the list stand as the poem's spine.
A challenge
Write a poem about an object bought from a stranger, a coat, a car, a house, that turns out to have been someone else's lucky charm, and what its new owner slowly inherits along with it.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem set in the thirty seconds after a near miss, the lorry that braked, the branch that fell behind you, when the ordinary street suddenly looks hand-painted and temporary.
Before you submit
- At least one near miss is rendered in concrete, unadorned detail.
- The poem resists explaining why fortune fell as it did.
- Superstitions, if present, carry human need rather than decoration.
- The tone stays understated where the events are largest.
- The ending leaves the reader feeling their own luck, not reading a moral.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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